

- % # * 



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PEE SEN T 

Conflict of Science 



WITH THE 



IHRISTIAN KELIGION; 



OR, 



MODEM SCEPTICISM MET ON ITS OWN GROUND. 



BY ^ 

HERBERT W. MORRIS, A.M., 

FORMERLY PROF. OF MATH. IN NEWINGTON COL. INST., AUTHOR OF " SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE," ETC. 



Every one wishes to have the Truth on his side ; but it is not every one that 
sincerely wishes to be on the side of Truth. — Whateley. 



IX-.T-.TJSTIE^.A.TIEID WITH 

m&&§ md® im©g^wom(S© ®ro ©tthkl Mm w®@® a 



PUBLISHED BY 

P. W. ZIEGLER & CO., 
Philadelphia, Pa., 

AND 

cr. c. nvc cc tji^idy & co., 

Cincinnati, 0., Chicago, III., & St. Louis, Mo. 
1875. 



Entered accordiDg to Act of CoDgress, in the year 1875, by 
P. W. ZIEGLER & J. C. McCURDY, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 




The LifcR * <v 

OF CONr,K.NjS 
WASHINGTON 



Preface. 



HE Bible, though not given to teach physical 
science, yet is closely connected with it in all its 
branches. Its revelations, narratives, predictions 
and lessons traverse every province of nature, and 
are more or less interwoven with nearly all its 
facts and phenomena. This sacred book, therefore, 
is open and exposed to scientific scrutinies, tests 
and criticisms on every side, and of every character; 
and it has, in fact, already passed through ordeals of this sort of 
such severity as no other book in existence has encountered. 

The means and method of assailing the Bible have changed 
with the changes of time. With the progress of light and investi- 
gation, old grounds and old weapons have again and again been 
abandoned, and new ones taken up. Such a change of arms and 
tactics has taken place in our own day ; and the coming on of 
this new order of warfare was long since foreseen by those wise to 
discern the drift of the human mind. Twenty-five years ago 
Hugh Miller ventured the assertion : " The battle of the Evidences 
will have as certainly to be fought on the field of physical science, 
as it was contested in the last age on that of the metaphysics." 

That prediction was true; it is now being fulfilled. The 
conflict on this ground has already for a length of time been 
waged with persistent energy. Every object and element on the 
field of science, which learning and ingenuity could convert into 
an ally or a weapon against the Sacred Volume, has been seized. 

5 




G PREFACE. 

The developments of geology have been arrayed against the 
Mosaic account of the creation. The facts of natural history have 
been marshalled to overthrow the doctrine of man's creation in 
the likeness and image of God. Anatomy and physiology have 
been employed to destroy belief in the unity of the human race, 
and to establish for its different branches so many distinct origins. 
Archaeology has been pressed into the service to bring up from 
caves, or mounds, or catacombs, relics, no matter of what sort, if 
they could be employed to undermine or to oppose the statements 
of holy writ. Philology has been tasked to its utmost ability to 
carry back to an immeasurably distant past the origin of mankind, 
by attempting to prove that the languages they speak are the slow 
growth of many tens of thousands of years. The laws of nature 
have been tortured to give evidence against the providence and 
even the presence of God in the world. In short, nothing has 
been passed by that promised in anywise to aid in the overthrow 
of "the Old Book." 

As a result of all this, we perpetually hear it affirmed, in 
private conversation and public lectures, and see it printed in 
daily journals and monthly magazines, that the discoveries of 
science are in collision with the statements of Scripture. Isolated 
facts, facts imperfectly studied, facts misinterpreted, and facts 
invested with fictitious significance and importance, are paraded 
under the imposing name of science, and boldly' put forth as con- 
clusive evidences, for the discomfiture of Christians. Every 
difficulty connected with the Bible, real or imaginary, is loudly 
proclaimed, often magnified. The doubtful inferences of biased 
criticism, and the mere theories of speculative philosophy are 
delivered with assurance as so many established truths. And the 
attempt is industriously made to create the impression that " the 
world 99 is gone after these errors. 

The consequences of all this are but too obvious. It has had 
its effects. As (he continual dropping of water will wear away 



PREFACE. 7 

the stone, so the constant application of such influence does tell, 
has told, not only on minds less vigorous or less cultivated, but 
also on those more active and intelligent. It has served to awaken 
doubts where no misgivings existed before. It has made errors 
familiar, and their acceptance comparatively easy, where formerly 
they would have shocked and been repelled. Many have been 
moved from the simplicity of their early faith in the Scriptures, 
and now follow their guidance with faltering steps. Many others 
have been rudely shaken from their once cherished convictions, 
and live on in a sad mixture of doubts, hopes and fears ; their 
wonted peace has been destroyed, though their faith may not have 
been altogether overthrown. While not a few, it is to be feared, 
have been brought to settle down in hopeless scepticism. And 
this leaven of iniquity is daily extending its pernicious influences. 

The present volume has been written to meet this state of 
things. Encouraged by the reception his late work on a kindred 
subject, "Science and the Bible" has met with — ten large editions 
having been called for within three years from its publication — 
the author undertook the preparation of this work from the desire 
and with the hope of furnishing thoughtful and inquiring readers 
with an antidote to these prevailing errors, of calming down the 
anxieties of Christian people, and of reassuring those who have 
been disquieted that the foundation of their faith still standeth 
strong. 

This the writer undertakes to do, not by denying or ignoring 
the sound deductions of science, for he accepts them, but by the 
light of established facts and the force of uncontro verted truth. 
He attempts not to offer any apologies for the Bible, for it does 
not need them. He appeals for no leniency at the hands of its 
enemies, for that were vain. He seeks not to shield it from- the 
investigations of science, for that would be equally futile and 
unwise. He believes that this Book is able to bear all the light 
that human science can concentrate and make to fall upon it, and 



S PREFACE. 

tliat the stronger that light is the more manifestly will its Divinity 
shine forth. He therefore bids science God-speed in its noble 
studies, assured that the Works of God will never be found in 
conflict with his Word. 

It will be noticed, and perhaps made a point for criticism, that 
the title given to the work is not in harmony with this sentiment, 
but stands opposed to it and to the drift of the whole volume. 
This, in a sense, is true. But as The Conflict of Science with 
Religion has become a current expression for the vital question of 
the day, it has been judged that this title correctly sets forth the 
subject to the discussion of which the book is devoted, whilst the 
sub-title sufficiently indicates on which side of the question the 
author stands. 

The main points of difficulty that have been urged against the 
Bible, on scientific grounds, are here presented, and discussed in 
their most recent aspects. 

In the preparation of the work the author has all along con- 
sulted, on both sides of the questions, the leading authorities, not 
only in America, but also in England, France and Germany. 

The facts connected with the various subjects that come under 
consideration are, in every case, brought down to the present day. 

In composing the work it was found impracticable, without a 
burdensome multiplication of words, to avoid altogether the use 
of scientific terms. As these may prove in some degree an embar- 
rassment to plain readers, a list of them, with their significations, 
has been placed at the end of the volume. 

Of the need and importance of such a work as the writer has 
here undertaken he has no doubt whatever ; but how successful he 
has been in accomplishing it he must leave to the decision of his 
readers. 



List of Illustrations. 



Page 

Christ Instructing the People Frontispiece. 

Vulcan, Pan, Neptune, Ceres, Jupiter, iEoLus, Serapis, 
Osiris and Isis, Thanatos, Bacchus 29 

Buddha, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva 31 

Map of the Planet Mars 43 

Aspect of the Earth in the Glacial Period 85 

The Man of God, startled, paused in his Prayer 118 

- An Ascidian 162 

Ascidian Tadpole 162 

Rock Formations 187 \ 

N Chalk under the Microscope 190 

^ Pishes of the Devonian Epoch 197 

Landscape of the Silurian Period 198 

v eurypterus remipes 200 

<Trilobite 204 

Left Eye of a Trilobtte magnified 204 

Fortuitous Variations 215 

Chimpanzee, Gibbon, Gorilla, Orang 270 

^outlines of the skulls of an adult chimpanzee, of a 
Native Australian, and of an average European. . 276 

- Outlines of the Engis Skull 306 

9 



10 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Page 

Types of Mankind 327 

A Picture copied from an Egyptian Temple 417 

Sphinx 419 

Swiss Lake Dwellings 446 

Stone Implements found in the Caves of Europe 467 

Hairy Mammoth engraved on a piece of Elephant's 
Ivory 481 

Primeval Man's Contemporaries 486 

Egyptian Brick Field 557 

Map of the Wilderness of Sinai 567 

Scene of the Delivery of the Law 571 

Egyptian Tablet at Magharah 576 

Profile of Palestine, North to South 595 

^ Profile Across— Jaffa to Moab 596 

^Sectional Views of the Dead Sea 610 

Lot's Wife 614 



Contents. 



UNITY OP CREATION AND THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS. 

The mental and moral state of Mankind at the advent of Christ — Gross dark- 
ness covered the earth — Painful incertitude — Heroic struggles for light — 
Ideas of the origin and government of the world — Association of deities — 
Gods of the Greeks, Eomans, Egyptians, etc. — Monsters of corruption — Ig- 
norance of the most enlightened — Views of Zeno, Cleanthes, etc. — Their 
highest wisdom sadly disfigured — Condition of man, unaided, hopeless .... 

Light breaking forth in an unexpected quarter — Sublime enunciations of 
Jesus — True ideas of Creation and Providence — New doctrines to the world 
— Christ alone as a Teacher — But one God and Ruler — Corroboration of 
science in these last days 

The world made and governed by One — Evidence of this — Laws of nature 
uniform and universal — Physical forces invariable — Types of animal or- 
ganization uniform — Sea and land and air correlated — Vital bonds between 
the earth and the atmosphere — Balancings of nature — Interdependence — 
The chain of love 

The earth a dependency of the sun — Related to the Planets — Similarity of 
adjustments — Equilibrium of the System — Identity of composition — Speci- 
mens of planet materials — The planetary family a member of a higher 
family — Sidereal systems numerous and magnificent — The throne of God 
the grand centre 

Bonds of the Universe. Gravitation — An all-pervading force — Embraces 
alike the minute and the vast — Poises world against world — Binds and 
guides the whole. Luminiferous ether — Its vibrations — Consignments of 
light and heat — Rate of travel — Pictures flying through space — The Cruci- 
fixion and Deluge still visible. Magnetism — The sun its source — Outward 
flow — A storm in the sun setting fire to buildings on the earth — Magnetic 
wave among the planets. Same forces acting throughout the universe — 
All creation related and in sympathy — The work of One Creator, the em- 
pire of one Ruler — The God revealed by Jesus a perfect character — Whence 

this wisdom ? — " I am from above." 

11 



12 



CONTENTS. 



LAWS OP NATURE AND THE DOCTRINES OF PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER. 

God ever in contact and communication with his works — The Scripture recog- 
nizes the Divine agency in all — Scepticism ascribes all to physical Laws — 
The difference great and important o? 

I. The True Import of Physical Laws. 
Erroneous conceptions prevalent — Law not an agent, but a rule — " Laws im- 
pressed on matter," a phrase without meaning — The universe not a self- 
acting machine — Atheism with a God — Senses in which the term Law is 
used — 1. Denotes order of facts — 2. The properties of matter — 3. The action 
of substances. Combining proportions of substances fixed — Beautiful com- 
binations of gases — Composition of solids invariable — The mountains 
weighed in scales — Yet Laws are not efficient causes — The power behind is 
God's — Matter neither self-active nor self-existent — Correlation of forces — 
All modifications of one force — This the will-force of God — Beautiful har- 
mony with Scripture — Many and great discoveries made — But the words of 
Jesus need no change or emendation „ 62 

II. The Eelation of Physical Laws to Providence. 
Providence a fundamental doctrine of Scripture — Materialists deny providence 
— Are we forced to this by science ? — Invariable action of individual forces 
admitted — Every result the effect of a combination of forces — Combinations 
endlessly variable — So, therefore, are the results — Striking examples of 
variable results from invariable laws — Any amount of good or evil possible 
without violation of laws — The hidings of God's power — Man's con- 
trivances and God's arrangements essentially different — Without provi- 
dence creation would rush into ruin — Illustrations — Tea and strychnia, etc. 
— Impurities in the atmosphere — Azone and disease — A universe under the 
control of a corps of philosophers — Arrogance of materialists — Humbling 
confessions of Spencer, Lyell and Tyndall — The Great Teacher — Sweet to 
be at His feet 79 

III. Bearing of Physical Laws on Answer to Prayer. 

Prayer a duty and a privilege — Enjoined by precept and example — Its effi- 
cacy plainly asserted 103 

Prayers for sustenance and 'protection — These pronounced by scepticism vain — 
Tyndall's statement — His presumptive boldness — Forced to acknowledge 
prayer reasonable — Answer to prayer not necessarily a violation of Law — 
If Tyndall is right, Christ must be wrong — Prayer for material benefits 
not a request for a miracle — Prayer answered, not by violating, but adjust- 
ing Laws — Man able to trace but a few links of the chain of cause and effect 
— The Divine influence imparted at a link above his reach — God never 
dissevered from the world's government — The fountain-head of influence — 
Connection of prayer and its answer like that of the moon and tides — 
Prayer of the Pilgrim Fathers for rain — Their prayer against invasion — 
Prayer of the persecuted Covenanters — Prayers of England and the Spanish 



CONTENTS. 



13 



Armada — Prayers of England and the Fleet of William of Orange — The 
science of to-day knows nothing to forbid belief in answers to these 

prayers 105 

Prayer for the sick — A dictate of nature — The last resource of the wretched — 
Even this the sceptic would bar up — " The hospital experiment " — Its ab- 
surdity shown from six considerations — It is the Jews again requiring a 
sign — Prayer the universal voice of nature — This religious instinct is a fact 
in nature — Not implanted to mock or deceive — Prayer of physical benefit 
to the sick demonstrated — 1. As regards remedies — 2. The patient's frame 
— 3. The burden of suffering — 4. The final issue. Important benefits de- 
rived, though no miracle be wrought — Abimelec — Hezekiah — Melancthon 
— Thomas Charles — What is promised in Scripture verified 125 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION AND MAN'S INNOCENCE, FALL, AND 
REDEMPTION. 

The common belief — Darwin's theory — Gradual variation — Struggle for ex- 
istence^ — Quotations from his works — Man's pedigree — Return to Democri- 
tus — Darwinism irreconcilable with Christianity — Undermines its funda- 
mental doctrines 157 

I. Origin of Species. 
Evolution but a hypothesis — The honored chiefs of science opposed to it. . . . 170 

1. The transformation of one species into another a thing unknown. Variation 
limited — Mummy dogs, apes, etc. — No change in 600 or 3000 generations — 
The beginning of a species never witnessed by man 171 

2. Bar to transformation set up in nature. Sterility — Law of hybridity — Cross- 
ings not natural, but artificial results — Humming-birds instanced — Huxley 
confesses the difficulty of this bar — Darwin speaks vexedly of it 173 

3. Chains of lineal descent not to be found. No evidence of their ever having 
existed — Said to be exceeding numerous, yet not one discovered — Wanting 
where most likely to be — Even the Horse and the Hipparion refuse to link 

— Testimony of Prof. Dana — And of Prof. Leconte 177 

4. Many animals of high organization have appeared suddenly upon the stage. 
Various instances — Theory and facts here in conflict — Phenomena of the 
ancient Devonian Sea 182 



5. Animals do not grow more and more simple as we travel back in time. 
Higher forms do not fade away towards worms or ascidians — Ideal 
Journey down through the earth's crust to prove this — The first foot we 
set down rests below the dust of Adam — We descend through the Tertiary — 
Ages fly past with every step — Wonderful scenes — Huge quadrupeds — 
Herds of Xiphodons — Strange tenants in sea and land and air — The nether- 
most confines of this formation reached — Vast distance in time traversed — 
No sign of fading away 185 

Enter the Secondary — Pass through 2000 feet of stratification — No mountain 
has yet lifted its head above the waters — A full mile of Jurassic formations — 



n 



CONTENTS. 



Records of cycles of ages— Other animals and other vegetation — "Waddling 
birds and wallowing reptiles — Strange and yet stranger creatures — Milton's 
fiend — Gigantic lizards and ammonites — High organisms and gorgeous vege- 
tation — A date reached immensely remote — But we see nothing to favor the 

theory of Evolution 188 

Advance into the Primary — Pierce through 3000 feet of Permian rocks — A 
thousand wonders passed — Arrive at the Coal Measures — The deposit of 
ages that cannot be numbered — Deeper into the awful abyss — Heat growing 
oppressive — steamy atmosphere — Pale sun — Shoreless ocean — The Devo- 
nian System reached — A historic volume two miles thick — Covering the 
lapse of periods immeasurable — Fantastic animals stare upon us — Armor- 
clad fishes — Beautiful jointings and claspings — Fishes of the highest order 
— No indication of waning — Again we descend, and enter the vast Silurian 
System, itself the representative of almost an eternity — We pass through it, 
and halt at the distance of 60 millions of years — A total change of popula- 
tion — But high types still occupy the earth — Trilobites and their compound 
eyes — These exquisite structures overspread the globe — We essay further 
descent, but soon all fossil remains cease — Thus to the earth's foundations 
we find nothing to favor this theory 193 

6. Animals of various types have survived unchanged from the remotest periods. 
Variation and change the basis of Darwinism — Many " persistent " animals 
known — Fatal exceptions — How account for these — The theory fails — 
Positive refutation — Sedgwick's emphatic declaration 208 

7. "Fortuitous Variation" could result in no system, or symmetry, or order. 
From this confusion only could come — Fortuitous animals, what they would 
be — No calculating what the size, disposition, or age of any creature would 
prove — The earth traversed by worse than classic monsters — Centaurs, 
Satyrs, Cyclops, etc. — How different from the existing creation — We see 
order, beauty, and harmony everywhere prevail — All bearing the impress 

of infinite wisdom — Fine utterance of Agassiz 213 

8. This Theory requires us to deny designing Intelligence, and to ascribe compli- 
cated and ingenious organs to fortuitous variations, which is to renounce the 
decisions of natural reason. Denial of final cause is the distinguishing 
characteristic of Darwinism — Proof of this from his works — Proof from 
the friends and advocates of his theory — Proof from those who oppose it.... 217 

The absurdities that follow this denial — (a) Ascidians advancing to limbless 
fishes — Happy fortuity giving them fins — Fins converted into wings, hoofs, 
claws, etc. — (6) How mammary glands were called into existence — Grati- 
fying accident — The young acquiring the art of extracting the milk — An 
incredible achievement — (c) Electric fishes — Marvellous construction of 
their batteries — Davy, Faraday, and Tyndall excelled by " fortuitous varia- 
tion " — A bushel of letters blown into the air coming down a poem — Evi- 
dence of the highest Intelligence — (d) Transformation of insects— The 
butterfly and sitaris — The theory in desperation — (e) Human organs of 
speech — Number and complication of their parts — Rapidity, delicacy and 
precision of their movements — Minutest alteration would result in dumb- 
ness— An apparatus of unfathomable importance — Yet the result of mere 
accident — Illustration of the utter improbability of this — (/) The Eye — 



CONTENTS. 



15 



A concourse of inimitable adjustments and adaptations — All within an 
inch globe — Panorama of Boston on its diminutive curtain — Collecting rays 
from stars inconceivably distant — If intelligence be not here, there is none, 
there can be none — If the Telescope be the product of intelligence, a for- 
tiori the living eye, of which that is but a copy 224 

According to Darwinism, no animal, no organ, was made for a definite 
purpose — The eye was not made to see, nor the ear to hear — Lucretius 
again among the living — Strangest human phenomenon — Three gods con- 
tending over a mass of jelly — Out of this, after millions of years, comes the 
living universe — Hindoo mythology outdone — How account for learned ad- 
vocates of such a theory — Are they firm in the faith they profess ? — Huxley 
ready to swing either way — This an indication of feeble convictions — The 
world not gone after them — Scientific chiefs still oppose — English, German 
and French authorities adverse — Decisive deliverances of Argyll and 
Agassiz — Christianity has nothing to fear from this source 248 

II. Origin op Man. 

Scripture account — Man a distinct creation — Made in the image of God — By 
disobedience fell. Darwinism derives man from a hairy quadruped — And 
thus denies his primitive innocence, his fall, and redemption — Demoralizing 
tendency of this theory — Conveys dark insinuations — Offers incentives to 
oppression and bloodshed 261 

This notion based on points of similarity between man and the ape — A 
shadow of truth — Similarity no proof of derivation — Why not monkey 
from the man ? — Gorilla our nearest ape relative — The vast differences. . . . 268 

1. Difference in aspect and habits. Description of the Gorilla — Its walk — Its 
nest — Its ferociousness — Its hideousness — Its strength in fight — Utterly un- 
tameable 270 

2. Difference in bodily structure. Comparative length of human and gorilla 
spine, arm, leg, hand and foot — Difference in the form of the spine, pelvis, 
foot and hand — Teeth — Chin — Skull. Capacity of the cranium in the 
various races of man — Average human brain three times that of the go- 
rilla — Different formation of the two brains — Man a distinct Order — Struc- 
tural difference between man and the highest ape immense — Testimony 
of Quatrefages, Bruner-Bey, Welker and Gratiolet — Man's derivation from 

the ape a baseless hypothesis 273 

3. Intellectual difference. The difference not in degree, but in kind — Man pos- 
sesses self-consciousness and the power of reasoning — Not a shadow of these 
in the ape — Intellect distinguished from instinct — Apes destitute of the 
germs of rational nature — They have not advanced one iota since the Mio- 
cene period — Man in his most degraded condition self-conscious and 
reasoning — A deep and wide chasm between — The gorilla lacks the founda- 
tion of mental progress — Distance between man and the ape practically 
infinite 283 

4. Difference in language. Man alone can talk — The terms of human language 
derived from Boots — The sounds made by brutes from emotions — Language 



16 



CONTENTS. 



an impossibility to a brute — Max Mailer's decisive argument — M. Figuier's 
view — Author of " Genesis of Earth and Man " on the point 288 

5. Moral difference. Conscience in Man only — Darwin's lame attempt to 
account for it — Not derived from social instincts — He misapprehends the 
nature of moral perception — His theory the weakest of its kind — No brute 
conscientious in any degree — Neither apes nor any other brutes manifest a 
sense of right and wrong — Conscience implanted in man alone — Conclusion 
from the foregoing points 294 

Darwin's style of reasoning — " Insensible variation " — Fallacy of such an ar- 
gument — The " series " between the monkey and the man — Unanswerable 
difficulties — Not a link or vestige .of the series can he produce — Such a 
series never existed save in imagination — Not one fact in its support 300 

Man does not degenerate toward the ape as we travel back in time — The ear- 
liest historical characters fully our equals — The oldest skull discovered 
".might have belonged to a philosopher " — The Cro-Magnon and Mentone 
fossil men as far from the apes as present Europeans 304 



On what then rests this hypothesis ? — On resemblances only — Human and 
brute ovules — Evidence of man's former hairy condition — The comical way 
in which he lost his hair — The evidence of his having once possessed 
" feelers " — Argument from diseases common to man and beast — Argument 
from the power of jerking the scalp — Argument from the four pointed teeth 
— Vestiges of his pointed ears — Indications of his ancient tail — The re- 
semblances fanciful and frivolous — His use of metaphorical terms — " For- 
tuitous variation " his only efficient deity — The existence of the human Kace 
but an accident — God allowed no part or place in His own world — Tho- 



roughly and throughout He is ignored 309 

Repugnance of evolutionists to the Divine Agency — Darwin's unscientific sin 
— Virtually giving up the controversy — The Hand of God acknowledged 
by Wallace and Mivart — Darwin's attempt an utter failure — The Bible 
account of Man's origin rational and abundantly sustained 319 



ETHNOLOGY AND THE UNITY OP MANKIND. 

Definition — Human family composed of divers races — Caucasian, Mongolian, 
Ethiopian, American, Malay — Distinct origins claimed for these — This ir- 
reconcilable with the Bible — Sets aside our Fall through Adam, and our 
Redemption through Christ — This view opposed to all philanthropic and 
missionary efforts — "Are we not all brethren ? " a question of fundamental 
interest — Not necessary to suppose many Adams and Eves — Another ex- 
planation more consistent with Scripture and facts 325 

I. Points of Difference in the Races. 
1. Difference of skulls — Three leading types : oval, pyramidal, and prognathous 
— No lines can be drawn between these — They vary and fade into one an- 
other — Thev are nowhere permanent — Change with time and circumstances 



CONTENTS. 



IT 



— Negro pictures in Egyptian temples — Diverse opinions about these — Not 
certain or decisive evidence — They prove at most but fixedness under the 
same conditions — Civilization softens and improves the skull — Why so little 
change in negroes among civilized nations — The Turks of Asia change into 
another type in Europe — Stunted Ostiaks transformed into handsome no- 
bility — A change as marked of an opposite character — Change in English 
emigrants to America, Australia, and the West Indies — Different forms of 
skull therefore no proof of different origins 334 

2. Difference, in Color. This commonly regarded permanent — Facts prove the 
contrary — Arabs found of every shade — Kabyles graduate from white to jet 
black — The scattered Jews acquire the color of the nations among whom 
they dwell — Hindoos are on the plains ' black, in the highlands copper- 
colored, and on the mountains fair — Native Africans vary greatly both in 
form and color — So do the American aborigines — So do the Polynesian 
Islanders — Kordofan Negroes changed into Egyptian form and complexion 
— A similar change in the Funge — The fair Siah-Posh once black — Color 
very variable — This difference therefore no evidence of different origins . . 348 

3. Difference in Hair. Color of hair related to complexion — Majority of men 
dark-haired — Europe the seat of light hair — Hair and latitude — What 
gives hair its color — Negroes' hair not wool — Africans with flowing hair — 
The hair of Arabs, Jews, Cinghalese, Berberines, Indians, etc. — Hair no 
fixed distinction. Conclusion : all these differences together prove not a 
diversity of origin 355 

II. Points of Identity in the Eaces. 

1. The Races in their organizations and functions are so identical that no lines can 
be drawn dividing them into distinct species. Scarce two authorities agree in 
their divisions — Thirteen naturalists give thirteen different classifications. . 359 

2. The vital functions and periods are the same in all. Growth, maturity, gesta- 
tion, age, etc 30 

3. All races are fertile with each other. This deemed the strongest proof — Evi- 
dence in the United States, in South America, in India, etc 361 

4. All have the same Intellectual Faculties. This evinced by Negroes, Austra- 
lians, etc.— Facts in evidence — Hottentot's, their reception of Christianity 
— Banneker, the Negro Mathematician— A Guinea Negro a teacher of 
Greek and Latin in Scotland — A stolen African girl becoming an admired 
scholar and poet — These a demonstration of the same intellect and moral 
sense in all Eaces 3G2 

5. The Languages of all traceable to the same origin. Languages in perpetual 
change— 4000 tongues in use— The Old World languages traced to five 
branches — Humboldt's view — Basis of classification — Illustration in the 
Latin and Japetic languages — Indo-European tongues — The five primitive 
branches derived from one original stock 373 

6. All Races have certain arts, customs, etc., in common. Dancing, Music, Ges- 
ture-language, Bow and arrows, use of fire, etc., etc 380 

2 



18 



CONTENTS. 



The evidence, positive and negative, summed up — Conclusion: "All nations 
of men made of one blood " — Authorities — Bible confirmed — A remark- 
able doctrine for Jews to hold— Happy tendencies of this doctrine 381 



CHRONOLOGY AND THE ANTIQUITY OP THE HUMAN RACE. 

An important study — Common system — Insufficient data — Marginal dates no 
part of the Bible — These an open question — Table of dates according to the 
Hebrew and Greek Texts — Chronology of the latter preferred — How the 
versions came to differ — Chronologies of the Egyptians, Hindoos, and 
Chinese — Attack from this ground on the Scriptures — The great question 
— Kemotest stand-point safe to occupy — Scanty information beyond — The 
world's population at the call of Abraham — This great population presents 
several difficulties 389 

1. Difficulty in regard to the aggregate population of the earth at that time. 
Length of time from the Deluge to Abraham — Rate of human increase — 
That of Malthus fair — Peopling of Pitcairn Island — Increase of Noah's 
family at the call of Abraham — This ample — Difficulty vanishes 401 

2. Difficulty with regard to the Egyptian Monarchy — An old kingdom on Abra- 
ham's first arrival — Its beginning asserted to antedate the Flood — Various 
readings of Egyptian hieroglyphics — Their dates and periods uncertain — 
The kingdom not founded more than seven centuries before Abraham — 
This an ample period to account for all he found there — Egypt favorable to 
increase of population — Estimate of it at the time of Menes — Estimate at 

the time of Abraham — Bible and facts at one 404 

Antiquity claimed for Egyptian civilization and art — This assumes that the 
first settlers were savages — No evidence or reason for this — Probably carried 
much of antediluvian knowledge and art with them — The country favor- 
able to progress — Assertions of sceptics exposed and refuted — Age of the 
Great Pyramid — No valid objection to the Sacred History 407 

3. Difficulty presented in the early occupation of China. The antiquity and dis- 
tance of that nation — Asiatics prone to exaggerate their antiquity — The 
Chinese forming into a nation b. c. 2000 — Ancient nomads moved often 
and rapid — Reasons for this — Rate of migration eastward — Probable date 
of the first arrival in China — All credible information respecting the Chi- 
nese reconcilable with the Bible 412 

4. Difficulty in connection with the early development of mankind into distinct 
Races. Well-marked distinctions in a very early day— " Can the Ethiopian 
change his skin ? " — Negroes in the oldest Egyptian paintings — Value of 
these as evidence — Earlier and later paintings differ — Septuagint chronol- 
ogy allows abundant time 416 

5. Difficulty in connection with the early existence of distinct languages. Natural 
development of language slow— The "confusion of tongues" obviates the 
difficulty — The objector met on his own ground — Mode of the change and 
divergence of languages — Going on always and everywhere — No Jiving 



CONTENTS. 



19 



language 1000 years old— The subjects of King Alfred and those of Queen 
Victoria speak different tongues — The same true of the Germans, French, 
and Italians — Conclusion from these facts 421 



ARCHEOLOGY AND PSIMEVAL MAN. 

Definition of this science — Late discoveries numerous and interesting — The 
inference made therefrom of Man's antiquity — Eelics classified and made 
to represent periods — The Stone Age — Bronze Age — Iron Age — Computa- 
tions of time based on these hypothetical — The three ages often contempora- 
neous — They offer no data for computing time — The remoteness of the 
earliest overestimated — Evidence of all three within historic times — Proof 
from Virgil, Hesiod, Homer, Joshua and Moses 429 

1. Danish Peat-beds. The succession of forest trees imbedded in them — The 
stone, bronze and iron relics found in connection with these — Argument 
therefrom for man's antiquity — The conclusion but a conjecture — Growth 
of peat more or less rapid — Complete change of timber in one generation — 
Various instances in the United States — Improvement in tools not always 
the slow work of ages — Conquest or commercial intercourse might have 
done this suddenly 437 

2. Banish Shell-mounds. Their situation, size and form — Eelics found in 
them — The argument from the Flint Knives, etc. — Argument from the 
bones of extinct animals — Argument from the Oyster-shells — Oysters can- 
not now live in the adjoining waters — This change taken to indicate a vast 
period — Facts that go to prove the contrary — Similar mounds in America . 441 

3. Swiss Lake-dwellings. Circumstances of their discovery — Eemains of 200 
villages found at the bottom of the lakes— The tools, skeletons, weapons, 
etc., found among them — The bearing of these on Man's antiquity — Not what 
scepticism would have it — Their inhabitants- not savages — Evidence of art 
and commerce — Their utmost age — Nothing to affect Scripture 445 

4. The Mississippi Discoveries. Wild reports — Hasty conclusions — Lyell's ob- 
servations on the valley — A skeleton asserted to be seven times the age of 
Adam — The Eiver perpetually shifting its channel — Engulfs and sweeps 
away its banks — Old islands melting away, and new ones forming in its 
floods — Its deposits far down are utterly promiscuous — The age of no fossil 
or relic can be determined from its position — Trees, wrecks, corpses, etc., 
are being continually buried at all depths — Sixty years ago the deepest 
part of the channel lay through what is now the heart of New Orleans — A 
relic of 57,600 years turns out the gunwale of a Kentucky Flat-boat — A 
lesson for the friends and the enemies of the Bible 450 

5. The Valley of the Nile and its Relics. This similar to that of the Missis- 
sippi — Eate of alluvium deposit — Pottery from the depth of 90 feet — 
Staggering antiquity announced — Two sets of shafts sunk across the valley 
— Jars, vases, etc., brought up— Animal remains — Alarming calculations — 
Former rate of deposit greater than the present — A fair and reasonable es- 



20 



CONTENTS. 



timate of time — Burnt brick a sure Roman trace — All the relics found may 
have been buried as those of the Mississippi — This disposes of all difficulty. 455 

6. Cave Bones and Implements. Caves numerous in Europe — Caves of the 
Muse and their relics — Brixham Cave and its astonishing contents — Cave of 
Wells, a magazine of fossils — The Gower Caves, filled with the remains of 
Reindeer and Hippopotami — Kent's Hole — Examined by the British 
Association — Numerous and wonderful details. Relics in Gravel-beds and 
Terraces — Discoveries in the Valley of the Somme, of the Thames, etc.— 
How intermixture of relics may be accounted for in general — Exceptions 
that prove Man and some extinct mammalia to have been coeval 461 

Sceptical inferences from these facts — Argument based on the situation of 
the caves and terraces, examined — Rests mainly on three assumptions — 
Present rates of change no parallels of former rates — All calculations on 
such comparisons not reliable — Argument based on Man's extinct animal 
contemporaries, examined — Other assumptions — Cave-bear, Cave-lion, 
Mammoth, etc., more recent than was supposed — Graven pictures of them 
discovered in caves — Particular account of these Pictures — Conclusion. . . . 472 

Siberian relics — Carcass of a woolly rhinoceros — Mammoth with flesh and 
skin and hair still preserved — An elephant at the Arctic Circle with the 
eye-balls in their sockets — Abundance of ivory along the Arctic coast — 
Discovery of hairy elephants in 1870 — How lived, how died these great 
mammals in those regions ? — How herds might have been overtaken by 
storms and floods— Interesting example from Hue's Travels — Great cli- 
matal changes — Resume and conclusion 483 

All races, like individuals, doomed to extinction — The dates at which various 
animals have become extinct within historic time — Archaeology has nothing 
to present which cannot be harmonized with Scripture — The Bible chro- 
nology ample to cover all — Sceptical pretensions have met their just rebuke 
— Let not the Christian miss his lesson hence 490 



NATURAL HISTORY AND THE DELUGE OF NOAH. 

The first man created innocent— Became depraved through disobedience — 
Transmitted the contagion of sin to his offspring— His posterity waxed 
worse and worse— Reached a pitch of iniquity not to be endured longer — 
The Deluge was brought in to sweep them all away — The memory of this 
catastrophe preserved among all nations 497 

1. Moral aspect of the Deluge— A judgment, yet sent no less in mercy than in 
justice — The evils that would have ensued had it been withheld — Benefits 
ensured by its infliction 504 

2. Physical character of- the Deluge — No certain marks or traces left by it on 
the face of nature— This agreeable to both geology and Scripture— Geology 
proves the possibility of such an event — This beautifully shown in the 
geological history of the British Islands— Also in the Delta of the Indus. . 506 



CONTENTS. 



3. Extent of the Deluge — Commonly supposed to have been universal — Serious 
difficulties to this view — The capacity of the Ark inadequate — Its form and 
dimensions—The vast number of living creatures to be accommodated — ■ 
Additional numbers of clean animals — The amount of food to be stowed 
away — Such a cargo beyond the Ark's capacity. A universal deluge would 
have required animals from opposite extremes of climate to live in one and 
the same hold — Would have destroyed multitudes of fresh-water fishes, of 
delicate plants and flowers, and of frail and ephemeral insects — Would have 
required many animals to be transported across oceans to and from the ark. 
Miracles alone could have overcome these difficulties — God ever sparing 
of miracles — Dr. Chalmers on this point — Spirit of the Record — Universal 
terms of limited import — Not required to believe that the whole earth was 
submerged — Universal as to mankind, but limited as to the globe, no new 
interpretation — This view removes all difficulty 

4. How the Deluge was produced. Natural agencies employed — "Fountains 
of the deep," and " windows of heaven," their import — Elevation and de- 
pression of the earth's crust, how produced — This applied — Result shown 
by the great Tidal Wave of 1868 — Fearful phenomena along the American 
coast — The wave's extent, height, and rate of travel — Sweeps outward to 
the Sandwich Group — The islands sink and rise and rock — Reaches Japan 
in an incredibly short time — Rushes at midnight upon the Samoas and 
New Zealand isles — And finally dies away along the Australian coast — 
This may illustrate the means and manner in which the Deluge was brought 
about — The rise and fall of the waters of Noah described in harmony with 
Scripture 

5. Where the Ark rested. Scripture does not determine this — Various locali- 
ties claim the honor — Remarkable account of the Deluge and the Ark's 
resting-place found in the ruins of Nineveh — Situation of the Bible Ararat 
uncertain — That in Armenia a magnificent mountain — Its ascent and de- 
scent all but impossible — Therefore not the place of rest — Probable location 
of "Ararat" — Resume and conclusion 



STATISTICS AND THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE HEBREWS. 

The choice and call of Abraham — His seed settle in Goshen — At first favored 
there, then oppressed — Their number when led forth by Moses — The diffi- 
culty presented by their vast increase — In meeting this, must consider 
three things — 1. The original number of settlers — Not " seventy souls " — 
Omissions — Number of Abraham's household — That of Jacob much greater 
— "Strangers" — Aggregate — 2. The rate of their increase — The country 
very favorable — Additions from without — Healthy and vigorous — And the 
Divine blessing on them — 3. Length of their stay — This in dispute — 
Briefest period accepted. Calculation on the foregoing data — The result in 
agreement with Scripture 

Proof that their stay in Goshen was not 215 but 430 years — With this all 
difficulty disappears 



22 



CONTENTS. 



OE0L0GY AND THE WILDERNESS OP SINAI. 

The Israelites led into this wilderness to be schooled — The difficulty in regard 
to their subsistence there, stated — General answer to this — New light from 
recent investigations 563 

The Sinai Wilderness described — Situation, form and dimensions — Features 
of its three borders — The centre a cluster of granite rocks, rent into chasms 
and peaks — No indication of volcanic agency — Division — Um Shomer and 
its mysterious surroundings — Mount St. Catherine, the prospect from its 
summit — Mount of Moses — Has Safsafeh — The " Huge Altar " whence the 
Law was delivered — Mount Serbal with its sublimities — Illumined by 
the Pillar of Fire — Wadys and their ' peculiarities — Sudden and terrific 
flood — Geological features — Ancient Egyptian copper and iron mines — 
Hieroglyphics — Escarpment of the Tih — " Wilderness of the wanderings." 565 

More particular account — Palmer's recent exploration — Many rich valleys 
and pleasant spots — Water and Vegetation plentiful — Character of the 
vegetation — Beautiful touches — F. W. Holland's account of this Desert — 
His opinion — The region capable of supporting a large population to-day 
— Proofs of greater productiveness in the days of Israel — Destruction of 
Forests — How this has affected both soil and climate — Ordnance Survey 
Expedition — Identify many of the halting-places of Israel — Their Report 
corroborates the Mosaic History — Every member returns home with his 
faith confirmed 579 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND THE LAND OP PROMISE. 

Canaan the home of Abraham not by his own choice but God's — God chose 
it to be the Depository of His Truth given to men — Infidelity sneers at this 
— Reasons for the choice to be now shown. 589 

Western Palestine. 
Geographical position of the country — Two mountain Ranges to the north — 
Lebanon — Grandeur of the view from its summit — The Cedars — Cleft of 
the Leontes — Northern Galilee — Plain of Esdraelon — The hilly range 
continues through Samaria and Judea, down to Hebron — Height of the 
principal points — Plains of Sharon and Philistia — Barren aspect of the 
country — In former ages widely different — Evidence of its former populous- 
ness in the Ruins — Many tracts still fruitful — Instances 592 

Eastern Palestine. 
Anti-Lebanon — Hermon — Trachonites — Continuation of this Range east of 
the Jordan — Gilead — Moab — Ajlun and Nebo and Hor — Streams and 
groves — Open glades — Heavy timber — A beauty in Gilead and a richness 
in Moab still 600 

Valley of the Jordan. 
Lies between Eastern and Western Palestine — Sources of the Jordan — Lake 
Huleh — Course of the River thence to the Sea of Galilee — Shape, size, and 



CONTENTS. 



no 



general appearance of this Sea — The beach and surrounding hills — Ther- 
mal Springs along the shore — Exit of the Jordan— Its course hence south- 
ward tortuous and full of rapids — Scenery along the Valley — Aspect of the 
mountains on either side — The approach to its dismal termination 603 

The Dead Sea. 

Its position, length, breadth, and depth — Its depression below the level of 
the Mediterranean — Hemmed east and west by steep mountains — Its 
western shore traced — Stupendous gorge of the Kidron — High precipices 
and opening caves — Engedi — Dr. Robinson's terrible descent — Mountain 
of Salt — Its contribution to the briny waters — Hollow and ringing shore — 
Pillar of Salt — Ascent to Kerak on the east side — Tremendous storm — 
Mysterious aspect of the Sea from above — Hot and sulphur and bituminous 
springs — Density of the Lake water — Neither man nor beast can sink in it 
— Like a cauldron of fused metal — Phosphorescent foam — No living thing 
in it — Such is Palestine, a world in miniature 609 

Reasons for God's choice of this Land. 1. Its separation by mountains and 
deserts from the rest of the world — The people could dwell alone — 2. It 
offered a suitable frame-work for training the " Vine of God's own plant- 
ing " — Every Land has its influence in moulding the character of its in- 
habitants — So Palestine Israel's character — 3. Its fitness to be the Birth- 
land of the Book designed for all nations — Offered figures and images 
familiar to every country, and appreciated by men in all avocations — The 
Mariner, Shepherd, and Husbandman — The Ethiop and the Esquimaux — 
4. Its central position — The meeting-point of Asia, Africa, and Europe — 
Chosen for wise and important ends 618 



TOPOGRAPHY AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY. 

Jesus a character that stands alone — The wonderful simplicity of his History 
— Admired, yet assailed as no other Record ever was — The attacks of Straus 
and Renan — The Evangelists honest Narrators — Gospels, unlike myths or 
legends, specify times, places, and persons — Every successive exploration 
of the Holy Land developes additional confirmation of their truth 629 

1. Connection and harmony of the Gospels with localities as found and seen at this 
day. Bethlehem and the Nativity — Nazareth, its name, and fountain, and 
" the brow of its hill " — Scene of the Saviour's Baptism — The " high moun- 
tain " of his Temptation — Jacob's Well and the Temple of Gerizim — The 
Sea of Galilee ; its splendid cities and busy population ; the principal field 
of his ministry ; the accordance of his movements, deeds, and discourses 
with the features of the locality ; the History and the Scene in harmony — 
Capernaum and its synagogue — Chorazin — Gennesaret — Magdala — Tiberias 
and its splendid ruins — " The steep place " — The desert places — Every site 
and scene confirms the Gospel 634 

Leaving Galilee, Jesus comes to Jericho — The ascent thence to Bethany — Its 
Name and Tomb still remain — Mount of Olives — The triumphal Ride — 
Sudden view of Jerusalem — The Son of God in tears — Complete coinci- 



2i 



CONTENTS. 



dence of the Record and localities — Entering Jerusalem — Retiring to 
Gethsemane, its location and olive trees. Recapitulation and conclusion . . 652 
2. The connection and correspondence of the Imagery of the Gospels and the 
features and productions of the country. Gospel similies indigenous to Pales- 
tine^ — The Mount — City set on a hill — Fowls of the air — Lilies of the field 
— House built on the sand — The Parables were read from objects daily seen 
—The Sower— The Tares— The Mustard Seed— The Draw-Net— The 
Vineyard — Fig-tree in the Vineyard — Fig-tree by the wayside — Showers 
and heat — All these have but one voice — Renan a witness for the Gospel 
History — Tristram's emphatic testimony — Conclusion 662 

Glossary 679 

Index 683 



Unity of Creation 

AND 

The Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. 



"I am come a Light into the world." He came forth from the bosom of the 
Father, as the Word, the Revealer of that Infinite Mind in which, from eternity, 
He had surveyed the Archcetype and idea of all truth ; and He spoke with the 
authority of a divine oracle. — Dr. John Harris. 

25 



I. The Gods many and the Lords many of the ancient Heathen: 
Their Ideas of the Origin and Government of the World. 

II. Jesus of Nazareth proclaims the Existence of One only True 
and Living God, the Creator and Ruler of All. 

III. The Teachings of Jesus confirmed by modern Science: Evidences 
that the earth and the whole universe are the work of 
One Supreme Omnipotent Being. 



26 



Unity of Creation 

AND 

The Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. 



i 

IGHTEEN hundred years have rolled by 
since the system of truths, embodied and 
preserved in the New Testament Scrip- 
tures, was proclaimed to the world by 
Jesus of Nazareth and his chosen disciples. 
The moral and religious condition of man- 
kind, at that period, was truly deplorable ; 
in every region, and under every rule, they were fettered 
and held in melancholy bondage by ignorance and super- 
stition of the most degrading character. Darkness covered 
the earth, and gross darkness the nations. The most 
favored and the most enlightened among them groped, as 
the blind for the wall, after the truth concerning the origin 
of the world, the powers that ruled over it, and the des- 
tiny of the race inhabiting it. Earnest, and often heroic 
was the struggle of natural intellect for the light ; but 
all their inquiry, observation and philosophy left them in 
fatal error, or, at best, in painful obscurity, on all these 

27 




28 UNITY OF CREATION. 

momentous questions. Even a Plato was constrained to 
begin his discourse of the gods, and the generation of 
the world, with the caution to his disciples, "not to 
expect anything beyond a likely conjecture concerning 
these things." And a Cicero, after ages more of investi- 
gation and subtle reasoning, was forced to the confession, 
"All these things are involved in deep obscurity." * The 
last and highest effort of Grecian philosophy was to erect 
an altar to the " unknown God." Thus the world by all 
its wisdom failed to attain to any clear or certain knowl- 
edge of the true and living God. 

Equally ignorant were they concerning the origin of 
the ivorld in which they dwelled. The sages and philos- 
ophers of antiquity, without an exception, believed that 
the earth, as to the materials composing it, at least, was 
eternal. Creation, or the originating of anything from 
nothing, appeared to them an absurdity— an act incon- 
ceivable, and impossible even to the gods. They held 
it as an indisputable axiom that " out of nothing nothing 
could be made." Hence some of them taught that deep 
in darkness, far beyond the refulgent expanse, the abode 
of deities, matter had ever lain, a rude and undigested 
and opaque mass, agitated by turbulent and irregular 
motions of its own provoking, and nurturing, as in a 
seed-bed, the rudiments of plants, birds, beasts and man, 
and even of every species of vice and evil. Others 
maintained that the universe arose out of a fortuitous 
concourse of eternal atoms; these, moving at hazard, 



* Compare, De Natura Dcorum, Lib. I. 



UNITY OF CREATION. 29 

produced by their constant meeting a variety of sub- 
stances, and finally organized forms. Others still held 
that the world both as to matter and form had existed 
without beginning, as they then beheld it ; " The uni- 
verse," they said, "is an eternal effect of an eternal 
cause." 

As to the government, or providence that was over the 
world, the general belief was, that all things were sub- 
ordinate to an association of powerful spirits, which were 
called gods. One of these, their deus maximus, was sup- 
posed to excel the rest in dignity, and to possess super- 
eminent authority, and assigned to the inferior ones their 
dominions and offices. His rule over them, however, 
was regarded as little more than nominal, as he could 
not legitimately invade their provinces, nor effectually 
frustrate their designs. Though this idea of associated 
gods was common, yet every nation held not to the same 
gods, but each had its particular deities, differing more 
or less from those of other countries, not only in their 
names, but in their nature, attributes and actions. Rome, 
indeed, claiming to be the mistress of the world, became 
also the pantheon of the world, and the asylum of 
deposed and fugitive gods from among all nations. Thus 
there were " gods many, and lords many," even past all 
enumeration. 

The Greeks and Romans named their chief deity 
Jupiter, whose empire was in the aerial regions; while 
Neptune ruled over the seas, and rivers, and fountains ; 
Vulcan over burning mountains and fires; JEolus over 
the winds ; Bacchus over the trailing and fruitful vines ; 



30 UNITY OF CREATION. 

Pan over the hills and pastures, herds and flocks and 
bees ; Ceres over grain, harvests, etc. Hence, it was 
deemed necessary for those who would ensure protec- 
tion, success and happiness, religiously to cultivate the 
patronage of every separate deity, and assiduously to pay 
that homage to each of them which they respectively 
claimed. Yet sometimes the gods would quarrel among 
themselves, and the worshipper in propitiating one would 
incur the displeasure of another, equally or more power- 
ful. Hence incertitude, timidity and gloom oppressed 
the common mind, and not unfrequently rendered life 
a burden.* 

The Celts selected for the objects of their adoration 
a set of ancient Heroes and Leaders, whose memory, so 
far from being illustrious for virtue, came down to them 
disgraced with vice, and loaded with infamy. Their 
fictitious history was a tissue of superhuman abomina- 
tions, and the rites of their worship for the most part 
revoltingly unclean. 

The Egyptians, whose civilization, arts and sciences 
antedate recorded history, made similar characters their 
gods, such as Osiris, Serapis, Typhon, Ms, and others ; 
with the worship of these was joined that of the Con- 
stellations, the Sun, the Moon, the Dogstar, Animals of 
every kind, even voracious and venomous Reptiles. And 
the worship they paid such deities was absurd, corrupt- 
ing and disgraceful to the last degree, f 

The Chaldeans and Persians believed in one supreme 



* Comp. both the Iliad of Homer, and the JEntid of Virgil, passim, 
f See Jablonski's Pantheon JEcjyptiormn. 




Buddha. 




UNITY OF CREATION. 31 

divinity, Mithra, under whom were two others of inferior 
order, Oromasdes and Ariman, the former the author of 
light, intelligence and all good ; and the latter of dark- 
ness, and of whatever is gross, or the cause of evil. 

The Hindoos from very remote antiquity embraced 
the system of religion called Brahminism, involving the 
worship of their three principal gods, Brahma, Vishnu 
and Siva. It was in form and in essence an enormous 
polytheism, if, indeed, it was not rather true Pantheism; 
for it taught that at the end of every Calpa (forma- 
tion) all things are absorbed in the Deity, and that 
at a stated time the creative power would again be called 
into action. 

The Chinese, and other nations of eastern Asia, fol- 
lowed Buddhism, their principal god being Buddha; it 
was in effect little else than sheer Atheism. Its highest 
reward of piety, and its object of most earnest desire and 
pursuit, was extinction of being, or annihilation. 

Such, in brief, were the prevailing religions of the 
most enlightened nations of the world at the time of our 
Saviour's advent. And these were the views and creeds, 
not of the unreflecting and ignorant only, but also of the 
most intellectual and enlightened — of poets, philosophers 
and legislators — of those who were the pride of their 
time, and the boast of their species. Socrates, while he 
uttered many sublime sentiments of a moral and religious 
nature, yet believed in a plurality of objects of worship, 
and expressed it as his conviction, that a wise and good 
man ought to worship the gods recognized by the country 
to which he belonged. His disciple and intimate friend 



32 UNITY OF CREATION. 

Xenophon declares of him, that he never undertook any 
work without first taking counsel of the gods. And 
his last request was that an offering he had vowed to 
Esculapius might be paid for him by his friends. The 
illustrious names of Zeno, Cleanthes, JEpictetus, and 
Marcus Antoninus, stand connected with a religious sys- 
tem, Stoicism, which, while it recognized in some sense 
a Supreme Being, drew no intelligible distinction between 
God and matter; which made Fate a prime article of 
faith, and affirmed that " when death is we are not." 
The religious sentiments of Seneca were of no higher 
type : " whatever that be," he said, " which has deter- 
mined our lives and our deaths, it binds the gods also 
by the same necessity ; human and divine things alike 
are carried along in an irrevocable course." Epicurus, 
though a man of most vigorous intellect, and the author 
of many wise, excellent and exalted sentiments, main- 
tained that the universe accidentally arose from a cloud 
of dust, that the gods were indifferent as to human affairs, 
or rather, entirely unacquainted with them. And Aris-r 
totle taught that " the chief deity resides in the celestial 
sphere, and observes nothing, and cares for nothing be- 
yond himself."* 

From all this we plainly see that even those individuals, 
who were endowed with a superior degree of intellectual 
power, and who occasionally obtained a glimpse of the 
truth, and of the right path, were unable to proceed in it, 
but ever and anon lost themselves in the mazes of doubts 



* See Brucker's Historia Philosophies Critica. 



UNITY OF CREATION. 33 

and errors, and disfigured what little they had acquired 
of sound wisdom, by an admixture of the most ex- 
travagant and absurd opinions. Left to its unaided 
struggle, helpless and forlorn, indeed, was the condition 
of our race. 

II. 

From this dark and desolate aspect of mankind, which 
presents itself to us alike in the valley of the Nile and 
on the plains of India, amid the temples of Greece and 
the palaces of Rome, let us now turn to another field — 
a field to which the great Names, whose sentiments we 
have now reviewed, would have scorned to look for light, 
or wisdom, or anything else great or good. It is the 
small and impoverished province of Judea, occupied by 
a subjugated and despised people. Here we behold a 
man, plain and lowly, reared amid the toil and poverty 
of an obscure village, going forth and discoursing to 
delighted multitudes on the profound subjects, which all 
the wisdom of sages had failed to illumine or relieve. 
This is Jesus of Nazareth. Let us listen to a few of 
his sublime enunciations. Without wealth, power, or 
prestige to support him, we hear him proclaim to the 
world with the calmness of assured knowledge and of 
conscious authority, in opposition to the philosophies 
and religions of all nations, that — 

There is none good hut One, that is God. 

All things were made hy Him ; and witJwut Mm was 
not anything made that was made. 
3 



34 UNITY OF CREATION. 

He upholdeth all things by the word of his power ', and 
by Him all things consist. 

He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, 
and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. 

He feedeth the foivls of the air ; He arrays the lilies of 
the field as was not Solomon in all his glory. 

A sparrow shall not fall on the ground without your 
Father ; the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 

He is the God and Father of all ; in Him all live, and 
move, and have their being. 

He is the King eternal, immortal, invisible ; the only wise 
God, whom no man hath seen, nor can see. 

Of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things : 
to ivhom be glory for ever. Amen. 

Thus, in all places, throughout his ministry, and by 
all his apostles, Jesus Christ proclaimed in the face of 
the world, and in the midst of the hoary idolatries of the 
earth, that there is but one God, true and living and 
wise and powerful ; that none shared with Him at the 
first in the creation of the universe, that none now share 
with Him in its government; that He hath made all 
things, and that for his pleasure they are and were 
created. This was a doctrine that was new and surpris- 
ing to the nations of the earth — a doctrine such as was 
never broached in the Academies of Greece, never heard 
in the Forum of Rome, never whispered by the oracles of 
Arcadia, Delphos or Dodona — a doctrine, indeed, far in 
advance, and far above all the wisdom of the world. In 
this, J esus of Nazareth stood alone in his teaching. No 
other instructor had ever put forth, or ever conceived 



UNITY OF CREATION. 35 

such exalted views of God, or of creation, or of provi- 
dence. 

And now the great question is, Was He right ? Are 
we to receive his testimony, single and alone, against 
the sentiments and practices of the whole world ? Was 
his teaching according to fact and truth ? Is it sus- 
tained and confirmed by the light of this nineteenth 
century? — We answer, Yes; completely and in all 

PAKTICULAES. 

No fact has been more clearly demonstrated by modern 
research, than that the Creation is one in its origin, one 
in its government, and one in its end. The heathen, we 
have seen, placed a separate god, of distinctive character 
and aims, to preside over every particular province and 
element of nature; but, as the Great Teacher utterly 
discarded, so the light of modern science has wholly dissi- 
pated these phantoms, by revealing one general plan, and 
the same general laws, running throughout every region 
and department of the universe. And now to the proof 
of this. 

III. 

Let us take a general survey of the globe we inhabit. 
And what do we find in evidence that all its parts and 
elements are the productions of one hand, and under the 
government of one mind ? The same sun illumines the 
day, and the same moon cheers the night, in every land. 
The same atmosphere envelopes the whole earth, and 
the same ocean-waters begirt and beat upon its thousand 
sinuous shores. The tides rise and fall, and the rivers 



36 UNITY OF CREATION. 

form and flow after the same manner wherever we go. 
Seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, 
and day and night, pursue their unwearied rounds for all 
nations, and for all time. Nowhere do we find or feel 
ourselves to have passed into the dominion of another 
and a different god. 

The grand elements of nature move and operate 
according to the same uniform laws, the world over. 
Whether we traverse the plains, climb the mountains, sail 
upon the seas, dive into caverns, or ascend into the clouds, 
we find these laws in undeviating operation. Not an 
element moves capriciously, not an atom floats at random. 
Gravitation exerts its power according to the same rule, 
gases combine in the same proportions, metals fuse and 
liquids boil at the same points of heat, light is reflected 
and refracted at the same angles, heat is radiated and 
the? air is condensed or rarefied after the same laws, and 
dew and rain and snow are produced under the same cir- 
cumstances and according to the same process — whether 
we stand on this or that side of the globe. 

The electric, magnetic and vital forces are likewise 
invariable in their action. The Needle elects its posi- 
tion, the fiery fluid of the clouds recovers its equilibrium, 
and life puts forth its powers, in the same way, wherever 
we go. Atoms cohere to atoms, and unite to form the 
crystal, or coalesce to produce the green blade, or aggre- 
gate to build the lordly tree, or blend to put forth the 
painted and perfumed flower, or combine to yield the 
luscious fruit — under the impulses of the same myste- 
rious laws, from the rising to the setting sun. 



UNITY OF CREATION. 37 

In like manner, one vast and magnificent plan runs 
and ramifies throughout the animal kingdom. While 
ten thousand varieties and innumerable minor distinc- 
tions prevail, all animated beings belong to this one 
system, and are related one to another as are the various 
members of one animal body. So uniformly is this plan 
of animal structure followed that, give to a Cuvier or an 
Owen a single bone, a single tooth, and he will be able 
to tell to what class of animals the owner belonged, and 
even what its character, its food, and its general habits 
were. The fowl and the fish, the carnivorant and the 
ruminant, the quadruped and the biped, retain and ex- 
hibit their distinctive peculiarities in every quarter of 
the globe. 

Modern investigation has gone still further, and proved 
that every province, element and agency of creation are 
connected with every other province, element and agency, 
that nothing stands isolated or alone, but that all form 
one grand and complete whole. Sea and land and air 
are closely related and mutually dependent. The ex- 
panse of the ocean has been proportioned to the extent 
of the continents, while the atmosphere has been con- 
stituted to form a medium of direct and ceaseless com- 
munication between them. The waters of the deep 
ascend in perpetual exhalations into the atmosphere, the 
atmosphere collects these into clouds, the clouds are 
borne along by the winds and condensed by the cold 
into rain, the rain descends in showers on the plains and 
the mountains, part of it is retained to nourish their 
vegetation and living tenants, and part flows together 



38 UNITY OF CREATION. 

and returns by the rivers to the ocean, to commence the 
same circuit again. Such are the connections and mutual 
adaptations of all these elements and agencies, fitting 
as wheel into a wheel, and pursuing their magnificent 
round of operation without waste, or weariness, or ces- 
sation. 

A thousand other bonds of relation and adjustment 
exist between the ground under our feet and the firma- 
ment over our heads. Every plant and tree and blade 
of grass is such a bond; each of these with its roots 
takes hold of the soil, and draws from it its food, while 
with its leaves it maintains communication with the 
atmosphere. Every bird, and beast, and human being, 
is also a similar bond ; while these derive their nourish- 
ment from the ground, they inhale the vital fluid from 
the air. Add to all this, their lungs, their ears, their 
organs of smell, their organs of speech, and even the 
pores of their skins are made for the atmosphere, and the 
atmosphere is made for them, being so constituted as 
ever to serve the purposes and meet the necessities of 
all these with promptness, facility and pleasure. 

Nothing can indicate more clearly the unity of crea- 
tion than the balancings of its different departments, as 
these depend upon the most skilfully arranged adjust- 
ments. Of this many striking instances at once present 
themselves. The ground is constituted to absorb heat 
from the sunbeams, and to retain it till night comes on, 
when it gives it out again, and thus its temperature is 
most admirably equalized. Again : the grass and the 
leaves absorb heat during the day, and again radiate it 



UNITY OF CREATION. 39 

into the clear atmosphere at night, till they are so 
reduced in temperature as to condense the moisture 
floating in the air into the dew-drops necessary to refresh 
and nourish them. And again : animals breathe oxygen, 
and in their exhalations set carbonic acid free for the 
use of plants ; and plants through the pores of their 
leaves imbibe this carbonic acid, and in return set 
oxygen free for the benefit of animals. Thus animals 
and plants balance one another to their mutual benefit, 
by the preservation of the atmosphere in its purity. 
And when both the plant and the animal have run their 
course, and die, the soil stands ready to receive their 
grosser materials, and the atmosphere to resume their 
more ethereal substances, which they had before respec- 
tively contributed to rear their organizations ; and, hav- 
ing renovated them, each is prepared to bestow them 
again on other and new plants and animals. In this way 
the Great Kuler of all unfolds and carries on that beauti- 
ful round of being, in which every link maintains its 
place and importance, and the happiness of every part 
flows from the harmony of the whole. 

"Look round the world! behold the chain of love 
Combining all below and all above. 
See plastic nature working to this end; 
Atoms to atoms — clods to crystals tend. 
See dying vegetables life sustain ; 
See life, dissolving, vegetate again. 
All served, all serving, nothing stands alone, 
The chain holds on, and where it ends unknown." 

Nothing, therefore, like the diversity of plan, or the 
divided dominion, or the conflicting authority of different 



40 UNITY OF CREATION. 

gods, such as heathen poets and philosophers vainly 
imagined, appears in all the earth, the ocean, or the 
atmosphere. 

But our chain of evidence to the unity of creation 
does not terminate with our own globe. Though the 
earth is a separate and distinct world, yet it has its con- 
nections and relations with other worlds ; and we now 
advance to contemplate these evidences in the loftier 
realms of the universe. 

The earth is a dependent satellite of the sun ; it could 
not have existed before the sun, any more than the eye 
before the head ; nor could it now continue to exist 
without him save as a mass of cold and dark and dead 
materials The welfare of our world — the welfare and 
existence of all terrestrial plants and animals are de- 
pendent upon the seasons, and the alternation of light 
and darkness ; but these again are dependent upon the 
earth's twofold revolution in reference to the sun; by 
the mighty power of the sun's gravitation its yearly 
circuit is accomplished. And from the sun comes down 
to us our light and heat and other essential forces. 
Whatever of tides or currents there are in the ocean ; 
whatever flowing streams or gushing fountains there are 
on the dry land ; whatever rain, or wind, or moisture 
there may be in the atmosphere ; whatever of beauty in 
form or color there is in the vegetable kingdom ; what- 
ever of activity or happiness there is found among ani- 
mated beings — all, all result from the manifold and 
benign influences of this glorious luminary. What the 
action of the heart is to the body, that the action of the 



UNITY OF CREATION. 41 

sun is to the earth ; it is the motive power of all its 
varied activities. The water and the air, the vegetable 
productions, and the animated beings of the whole earth, 
have been constituted with specific reference to the light 
and heat and actinism of the sun ; and the sun has been 
made the depository and dispenser of such light and heat 
as are specifically adapted to produce the motions, to sup- 
ply the stimuli, and to afford the conveniences, which 
all these require. In view then of such a concourse of 
essential relations, and striking adaptations, we cannot 
resist the conclusion, that He who made the earth made 
the sun also. 

Being thus related to the sun, we find ourselves related 
likewise to a family of a hundred other worlds — planets, 
planetoids and satellites — that revolve with us around 
him as a common centre. What the sun is to our world, 
he is to each of these. All are governed by the same 
gravitating power, all are illumined by the same light, 
all pursue the same- rounds, all exhibit the same forms, 
all enjoy similar changes of seasons and of day and 
night, while all constitute together one complete and 
harmonious system. 

That the members of this great family of worlds are 
of one origin, are the works of one and the same omnipo- 
tent Being, we have various evidences of a still more 
direct nature. The solar system is a complete whole ; 
all its parts are related, and mutually influence one 
another; and so nicely are their respective attractions 
balanced, that not a member could be struck out, or 
removed, without destroying the equilibrium and endan- 



42 UNITY OF CREATION. 

gering the safety of all. Again : under the telescope 
the moon exhibits a surface diversified like that of the 
earth, with plains and hills and valleys; it abounds, 
moreover, with the craters of volcanoes, having forms 
that are well illustrated by some of the earth's volcanoes, 
although of immense size. The principles exemplified 
on the earth are but repeated in the moon. The tele- 
scope reveals on the surfaces of the planets also clear in- 
dications of arrangements strikingly analogous to those on 
our own globe — such as land and water, mountain ridges, 
agitated atmospheres, floating clouds, summer heat, and 
winter snows. ( See the accompanying Map of the 
Planet Mars.) And that instrument of recent invention 
but marvellous powers, the spectroscope, has proved that 
many of the very materials composing our globe are 
found also in the composition of the sun. Hydrogen 
abounds in it, and sodium has been discovered there; 
besides these, the sun's atmosphere contains the vapors 
of calcium, magnesium, and chromium ; iron, copper, zinc, 
and other metals appear also to exist in the sun. Here, 
then, we have, not similarity only, between the earth 
and the sun, but, in a great measure, kindred and iden- 
tity of composition. And the same obviously holds 
equally true of all the other planets and the sun. Add 
to all the above the interesting fact, that we have sent 
down to us from the heavens specimens of these celestial 
bodies in the meteoric stones that have frequently fallen 
to the earth. It is now regarded as proven that these 
proceed from the inter-planetary spaces. Now these 
meteoric bodies, which have been found of all sizes, from 




43 



44 UNITY OF CREATION. 

a few ounces to many tons in weight, exhibit the opera- 
tion of precisely the same chemical and crystallographic 
laws as the rocks of the earth ; and in them has been 
discovered no new element, no new principle of any kind. 
Now, all the foregoing facts and considerations constitute 
a complete demonstration, that the sun, the earth, and 
all the other planets are the contrivance of one Mind, 
the work of one Hand, and under the dominion of one 
wise and almighty Being. We can discover nothing on 
the earth below, or in the heavens above, that lends the 
shadow of countenance to the idea, that these great orbs 
are under the rule of different deities ; nothing, indeed, 
that indicates the existence of such fabulous beings. 

The solar system, numerous and diversified as are the 
globes composing it, is but a member of a system still 
higher — a Sidereal System. As the planet Jupiter 
carries along with it its four revolving moons in its 
circuit round the sun, so the sun itself, with all its vast 
and magnificent retinue of planets and satellites, has 
been discovered to advance and revolve around a fixed 
centre, situated at an immeasurable distance in the 
depths of space. This centre is said to be the beautiful 
star named Alcyone, one of the Pleiades. Other suns 
(for such the fixed stars are believed to be), carrying 
with them equally large and splendid retinues of worlds, 
have been observed to revolve in a similar manner, along 
orbits of incalculable dimensions. In short, all the stars 
of heaven, countless as they may be, there are reasons 
to believe, are in like manner in incessant revolution 
through the trackless voids of immensity. Thus globe 



UNITY OF CREATION. 45 

is linked to globe, and system chained to system, while 
the whole amazing universe is fast bound to the invisible 
and eternal Throne of Jehovah. 

We have now reached a point in our argument, where 
we are prepared to contemplate yet higher and more gen- 
eral evidences of the unity of the whole vast creation, 
both as to its origin and its government. There are 
found in the universe certain laws and forces, which are 
observed to prevail, and to be in uniform operation, 
throughout all worlds, and all systems of worlds, to the 
utmost limit of telescopic power ; which laws and forces 
may be regarded as the common bonds of the whole 
material creation. Of these we notice, 

First, Gravitation, or that property of matter by which 
particle is attracted by particle, and mass by mass. In 
all material things this force is ever present and ever 
active. It is by its all-pervading influence that the 
glittering dew-drop is held together a crystal sphere 
upon the bending blade — that the apple loosened from 
the tree descends to the ground — that the river flows 
and leaps to form the grandeur of the cataract — that the 
moon is retained in her orbit round the earth, and the 
earth in its course round the sun. And throughout na- 
ture it operates undeviatingly according to the same law, 
so that the astronomer by means of it can poise the mass 
of one planet against that of another, and tell with abso- 
lute exactness and certainty their comparative weights. 
Throughout the universe the balance of gravitating force 
is unerringly sustained. If the smallest asteroid in the 
system, or the minutest twinkling star in the vault of 



46 



UNITY OF CREATION. 



heaven, were blotted out of existence, or even removed 
out of its proper place, the balance of gravitation would 
be disturbed, and the event felt through all the created 
systems of worlds. A slight trembling, produced by an 
unknown influence, in the motion of the planet Uranus, 
actually offered sufficient data to calculate both the 
position and the magnitude of the disturbing cause ; and 
upon directing the telescope to that point in the heavens 
indicated by the Calculator in his study, behold the 
cause in the lonely Neptune, a planet lying more than 
a thousand millions of miles beyond, and never beheld 
by mortal eye before ! So firmly, yet so evenly and 
delicately lies all nature in the embrace of this infinite 
power, that it is no exaggeration to say, that the blow 
that sounds forth the midnight hour upon the city Bell, is 
conveyed by successive impulses to everyone of the myriad 
orbs of heaven. From the imperceptibly small to the im- 
mensely large — from the centre of creation to its utmost 
bounds — gravitation exerts its force. It pervades and 
embraces and holds together the whole material universe. 

"The smallest dust which floats upon the wind 
Bears this strong impress of the Eternal Mind. 
In mystery round it, subtle forces roll ; 
And gravitation binds and guides the whole. 
In every sand before the tempest hurl'd 
Lie locked the powers which regulate a world, 
And from each atom human thought may rise 
With might to pierce the mysteries of the skies — 
To try each force which rules the mighty plan, 
Of moving planets, or of breathing man ; 
And from the secret wonders of each sod, 
Evoke the truths, and learn the power of God." 



UNITY OF CREATION. 47 

A second general bond of the universe is found in the 
all-pervading Ether. The existence of such a medium 
was long suspected; and now has been established to 
the satisfaction of scientific men generally. This ether 
is supposed to be an elastic medium of extreme tenuity, 
pervading all space, not even excepting what is occupied 
by material bodies,* and extending to the remotest 
limits of the universe. All substances, all planets, all 
systems, are enveloped in it, and suffused with it. Now, 
according to the prevailing theory of the day, light con- 
sists in a vibratory movement excited and propagated 
through this ether by the sun, the stars, or other lumi- 
nous bodies. It therefore resembles sound, which is 
produced by undulations in the air. In neither case 
is there a transfer of substance, or travelling entity, but 
simply a propagated motion, analogous to the waves 
generated by the wind across a field of wheat, in which 
there is no actual movement of the growing stems from 
their places, but only the advancing forms of waves. 
The vibrations in the luminiferous ether, by which light 
is produced, are supposed to be somewhat similar to 
these ; or, what is a better illustration still, to the vibra- 
tions propagated along a stretched chord. In this ether, 
therefore, we have, not simply a bond of connection, but 
a most marvellous medium of communication between 
all worlds, and all systems of worlds. On its swift- 
winged vibrations, consignments of light and heat are 
perpetually despatched from the sun to all his encircling 



* HerschePs Scien. Lects., No. VII. 



48 UNITY OF CREATION. 

planets and satellites, and from these again into sur- 
rounding space. Through its ethereal pulsations, every 
visible star in the heavens reveals its existence, and 
accurately announces its every change of position or of 
brightness, to every other visible star. By its mysterious 
agency messages of light perpetually come and go be- 
tween the innumerable orbs of heaven, traversing the 
voids of immensity in all conceivable, in all possible 
directions. Thus all regions, all provinces, all parts of 
the universe are in perpetual and infallible commu- 
nication. 

These ether messages are not transmitted instanta- 
neously, but occupy time according to distance. Light 
travels at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. Hence 
the light of the sun, or what is the same thing, the sun's 
picture, with all his dark spots and bright faculse, comes 
to us in eight and a quarter minutes ; the picture of 
Jupiter arrayed in his shifting belts, when at his mean 
distance, in three quarters of an hour; and that of Nep- 
tune, the remotest of the planets, in four hours. From 
the nearest fixed star, a Centauri, the passage of light 
occupies full three years; from 61 Cygni, ten years; 
from Sirius, the brightest of all the stars, twenty years ; 
from the Pole Star, forty-six years; from the serene 
Capella, seventy-two years; from the Pleiades, seven 
hundred years; from others as many thousands, and 
from others still probably as many millions of years. 
Hence when we direct our telescope to these stars, we 
see them, not as they are at the present moment, but as 
they were so many years or so many centuries ago. 



UNITY OF CREATION. 49 

From the foregoing facts it appears, then ? that from 
every star, every planet, every satellite, there flows out 
in all directions a distinct and perfect picture of what- 
ever scene or aspect its surface presents at every passing 
hour, every passing moment ; and this picture continues 
its outward flight forever into the depths of infinite space. 
The mariner takes observation of the star of the Pole, and 
his eye receives a picture of it that left its disc nearly 
fifty years since. The astronomer peers at Alcyone, and 
receives an image that took its flight from that orb full 
seven centuries ago. The same holds true, of course, of 
the planet upon which we dwell. To the inhabitants of 
those stars (supposing such inhabitants to exist, and to be 
endowed with the requisite power of vision), whose dis- 
tance from the earth requires two hundred and fifty years 
for the flight of light, the scene of the Pilgrims' Landing 
is just now becoming visible. To the dwellers of worlds 
at seven and a half times that distance, the sad and tragic 
deed of the crucifixion on Calvary is a present scene trans- 
piring in all its reality as under their eyes. The occu- 
pants of still remoter spheres, that are at the proper dis- 
tance, are now gazing upon the fountains of the great deep 
breaking up, and the windows of heaven opening, to sweep 
away the incorrigible antediluvians. Thus at some point 
or other, in the boundless expanse, every visible event in 
the history of our globe, and of all other globes, may be 
seen at any particular moment. And as the Infinite 
God is present at all such points, every deed and every 
event that has ever transpired must be still present be- 
fore his view. This luminiferous ether, therefore, may 

4 



50 UNITY OF CREATION. 

be regarded as an illimitable Volume, receiving and pre- 
serving on its mystic pages the full record of the universe. 

A third general bond we have in Magnetism. The 
sun not only sways the whole planetary system by his 
gravitating force, and cheers and animates it by his light 
and heat, but pours forth also a subtle yet powerful mag- 
netic influence upon its every member. Careful and 
prolonged observation of the vibrations of the Needle 
has demonstrated a uniform coincidence, both in time and 
in intensity, between the changes that take place on the 
sun's surface, and the changes observed in the magnetism 
of the earth. When the spots on the sun's disc are most 
numerous, then the vibration of the magnet is most ex- 
tensive ; and when his face is least obscured by these 
spots, then the Needle vibrates over the least arc. Un- 
usual agitations upon the solar surface produce what are 
called "magnetic storms" on our globe. Some of these 
storms have been very notable. In the year 1859, two 
immense bright spots, resembling vast luminous clouds, 
suddenly burst into view on the sun's surface ; instantly 
upon this, magnetic instruments were everywhere thrown 
into extraordinary agitation; "telegraphic communica- 
tion was interrupted; and, in some cases, telegraphic 
offices were set on fire; auroras appeared both in the 
northern and southern hemispheres during the night 
that followed ; and the whole frame of the earth seemed 
to thrill responsively to the disturbance which had 
affected the great central luminary of the solar system." * 



* Other Worlds than Ours, p. 32. 



UNITY OF CREATION. 51 

If our planet be thus affected by the sun's magnetic 
influence, then all the other planets also. Mercury and 
Yenus much more, as they are much nearer. But be- 
yond our earth, and beyond the orbit of ruddy Mars, 
the magnetic impulses speed with the velocity of light. 
The vast sphere of Jupiter and its four dancing moons 
are thrilled in every part, as the magnetic wave rolls in 
upon them ; then Saturn feels the shock, then Uranus, 
then Neptune ; and still onward in lessening force, but 
ever-widening circles, sweeps the mystic power — and who 
shall tell where it ends ! — In this magnetic influence of 
the sun, exerted with every passing instant, we see 
another important bond of union between the orbs com- 
posing the mighty universe, and another proof that they 
are the product of one creative Mind. 

From all that has now been stated, it plainly appears, 
that the same general forces which operate, and the 
same general laws which rule on the earth, prevail also 
in the heavens. So far as human science has been able 
to investigate, there is a unity in the composition, the 
construction and the government of the whole universe. 
Globes of matter are strewn throughout immensity. 
Motion is everywhere observable ; nothing is at absolute 
rest. Gravitation is omnipresent, and exerts its power 
alike upon the little and the great, the near and the 
remote ; by the same law it moulds the tear and rounds 
the planet ; by the same force it brings the one to the 
ground and carries the other on in its orbit. Light, too, 
manifests its presence everywhere; and whether it comes 
from the sun, from the moon, or from the most distant 



52 UNITY OF CREATION. 

star, it is governed by the same laws, and transmitted 
through the same medium. Heat, and Electricity, and 
Magnetism, also, are present, and do their wondrous 
duties alike throughout all material existences. " Hence 
the philosopher," says Humboldt, "arrives at last at an 
intimate persuasion of one indissoluble chain of affinities 
binding together all nature." 

St. Paul says of the human frame, " If one member 
suffer, all the members suffer with it ; and if one member 
be honored, all the members rejoice with it." This, in 
a certain sense, is equally true of the frame of Nature ; 
all its parts, likewise, are in sympathy; not a change, 
not a movement can be made but it is felt throughout. 
I strike a blow with a hammer, or cast a stone from my 
hand, and in so doing I create a current in the air ; that 
current slightly varies the temperature in the space 
around; this may lead to chemical changes, and these 
again may excite electric and magnetic currents, that 
shall take the circuit of the earth, and even of the uni- 
verse, without being lost. All creation is a unit. And 
" this unity of Nature is the reflection of the unity of 
that Supreme Reason and Intelligence, which pervades 
and rules over Nature, and from whence all reason and 
all science are derived."* Thus the unity of the visible 
creation carries us up to the unity of the Divine Nature, 
of which it is both a proof and an illustration. 

Creation, one in its origin, and one in its government ! 
This sublime conclusion, reached by human science after 



* Baden Powell's Unity of the Sciences, Essay I 



UNITY OF CREATION. 53 

so many ages of observation, research and study, is but 
the doctrine taught by Jesus of Nazareth eighteen cen- 
turies ago. One God, One Creator and Ruler of all, was 
the truth he proclaimed in the synagogue and in the 
temple, by the sea-shore and on the mountain's side. 
And the commission with which he sent forth his dis- 
ciples was to go into all the world and call men from 
dumb and senseless idols to worship and serve this true 
and living God, who made heaven and earth, and who 
giveth to all life and breath and all things. 

When all nations, civilized as well as savage; and 
all classes, from the legislator and the sage down to the 
menial and the slave, were wholly given to the worship 
of a pantheon of monstrous and corrupting divinities, 
Jesus Christ, wise above all his predecessors, and far in 
advance of all his contemporaries, announced and por- 
trayed God in a character worthy the Lord of the uni- 
verse. Unlike the local deities recorded in classic 
mythology, or those dressed and described by Greek and 
Latin poets, or those adored by Egyptian priests or Per- 
sian magi, fabulous in their nature and origin, and 
incongruous, corrupt and contemptible in their character, 
the Great Teacher revealed a God worthy the eternal 
admiration, confidence and love of all rational creatures 
— a God wise, holy, just, pure, and merciful ; in whom 
the intellect, the affections and the conscience of man 
may calmly and safely repose. 

The character of the Great Creator as given by Jesus 
Christ is a perfect character. Since the time of his 
sojourn upon earth, mankind have made great advances 



54 UNITY OF CREATION. 

in knowledge and civilization, in arts and sciences ; but 
the increased light, while it has exhibited both the 
deities and the religions of the heathen of his day, as 
being wicked, absurd and abominable, has served only 
to prove the character of the God of the New Testament 
to be immaculate and faultless. Here we have all that 
can enter the mind in the conception of God — a Being 
uncreated, infinite, all-wise, and almighty; the Maker 
and Kuler of all things; true and just and pure in all 
his ways; loving righteousness and hating iniquity. 
Nothing in all the compass of modern light and progress ; 
no principle established by the Moralist, no conclusion 
reached by the Metaphysician, no discovery made by 
the microscope of the Naturalist, or by the crucible of 
the Chemist, or by the telescope of the Astronomer — 
demands the change of a term, or the modification of a 
feature, in the Divine Character, as given by Christ and 
his apostles. It is a perfect character; it neither re- 
quires nor admits of any emendation. It is verily the 
Supreme Being, Lord of heaven and earth, that is set 
before us in the Gospel. And we are filled with awe 
and reverence in his presence. We instinctively bow 
down before the measureless heights, the unfathomable 
depths, the illimitable possessions, of this Uncreated 
Intelligence. We feel that worship is not simply be- 
coming, but a bounden and sacred duty, a necessary 
tribute, which we cannot reasonably withhold from such 
a Being. We are prompted, we are constrained to join 
in the angelic chorus, " Thou art worthy, Lord, to 
receive glory, and honor, and power; for Thou hast 



UNITY OF CREATION. 55 

created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and 
were created." 

How different the view presented by Christ of the 
nature and character of God from that given by Grecian 
philosophers, or Jewish Rabbins, or Oriental Gymnoso- 
phists. He describes Him as a Being of a purely spirit- 
ual nature, which no material images can represent; 
and, raising Him to an infinite height above all that 
man ever conceived, declares that He stands alone in 
absolute and unapproachable perfection. He presents 
Him as reigning sole over all the universe of matter and 
of mind. Drawing aside the veil which hid His glory from 
human view, he reveals Him in his high and holy place, 
not in a state of silence and solitude, but surrounded by 
ten thousand times ten thousand holy and happy beings, 
ever waiting and delighted to do his bidding ; not in a 
state of listless repose, but in active communication with 
every part of his vast dominions; not in a state of 
apathy, regardless of the world and all its concerns, but 
as presiding over it with a Father's loving care — observ- 
ing the actions, listening to the cries, and providing for 
the wants of every living thing; yea, even shows Him 
to us in the astonishing act of raising up the fallen and 
prostrate children of men, and putting them in the way 
of reaching his own blessed abode. 

" From whence, then, had this Man these things ? " — 
this plain and poor Man of Galilee, who never listened 
to the discourses of philosophers, never sat at the feet 
of a Rabbi ? Whence had he this knowledge, this sur- 
passing knowledge, which enabled him to deliver instruc- 



56 UNITY OF CREATION. 

tions that should survive all the progress, inventions, 
and discoveries of future generations ? Whence had he 
this superior wisdom which empowered him to rise im- 
measurably above all other teachers, and to harmonize 
all his instructions with the facts of the universe, as 
understood in these last days, and proved by the most 
recent and reliable deductions of science ? Whence, we 
ask, this knowledge, this wisdom to Jesus of Nazareth, 
which enabled him thus to announce truths that should 
be found in advance of the science of all successive ages ? 
But one answer, true and reasonable, can be returned — 
that returned by himself, — " I am from above, and am 

COME TO BE THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD." 

Yes; the truth Christ delivered to men flowed from 
the fountain of his own mind, as from its native home. 
His was the wisdom of God. He had all the knowledge, 
science and philosophy of the universe at his command. 
The key of all mysteries hung at his girdle. And had 
he seen fit, he could have forestalled all the boasted dis- 
coveries of our day, and have opened the gate to the tree 
of knowledge for man, and permitted him to feast on its 
golden fruit, without the toil of study, experiment, or 
investigation. "In Him were hid all the treasures of 
wisdom and knowledge." 66 Never man spake like this 
man:" "Hear ye Him." 



The Laws of Nature 

AND THE 

Doctrines of Providence and Prayer. 



You may interrogate the human race, in all times and in all places, in all 
states of society and in all grades of civilization, and you will find them every- 
where, and always, believing in facts and causes beyond this sensible world 
called Nature. — Guizot. 

57 



I. The true import of the phrase, "Laws of Nature:" The three 

DIFFERENT SENSES IN WHICH IT IS USED. 



II. The relation of Physical Laws to Providence. 

III. The bearing of Physical Laws on answer to Prayer: Prayer 
for Sustenance, for Protection, and for the Sick. 

58 



The Laws of Nature 

AND THE 

Doctrines of Providence md Prayer. 



N the New Testament Scriptures, God is 
represented as being not only present in 
every region and province of his vast domin- 
ions, but in active communication with every- 
thing that lives, or moves, or exists — work- 
ing in all and through all after the counsel 
of his own will. He is revealed to us as 
ruling universally and unremittingly over the world of 
mind and the world of matter, being interested in every 
creature, ordering every vicissitude, concerned in every 
event. Is the earth illumined by the sun, or watered 
by the clouds ? It is He who maketh that sun to rise on 
the evil and on the good ; and sendeth His rain on the just 
and on the unjust. Are the hills clothed with verdure, 
and the valleys adorned with flowers ? It is God that 
maketh the grass to grow, and arrays every lily of the field 
as was not Solomon in all his glory. Does a kernel of 
wheat, or some other grain, sink into the furrow and 

59 




60 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

decay in the soil to spring forth again and reproduce its 
kind ? It is God that quickeneth, and giveth to every seed 
his own body. Is the labor of the husbandman rewarded 
by the harvest of the field and the fruit of the vineyard ? 
It is He that giveth us fruitful seasons, filling our hearts 
with food and gladness. Are we startled with the sudden 
crash, or dazzled with the fierce glare of the fiery bolts 
that leap among the clouds ? It is the Lord that thun- 
der eth loith the voice of his excellency, and directeth the 
lightnings Under the whole heaven. Does the little bird 
rise to sing among the branches, or does it flutter and 
fall and perish ? By God's help it soars, and only with 
his consent it is brought low : Are not two sparrows sold 
for a farthing ? yet one of them shall not fall to the ground 
without your Father. Is the earth divided among the 
children of men ? Are its continents and islands peopled 
by races differing in their forms and complexions and 
capacities? It is God that hath made of one blood all 
nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and 
that hath determined the times before appointed, and tlie 
bounds of their habitations. — Thus this sacred Book 
ascribes all that takes place in the firmament and on the 
earth, in the history of man and in the varied lots of 
living things, directly and explicitly and emphatically 
to God. Nowhere does the Great Teacher, or do those 
whom He inspired, stop at second or instrumental causes. 
Nowhere do they devolve on the tool the honor which 
belongs to him who handles it. In the New Testament, 
throughout, God is the only efficient cause of all that 
takes place under the whole heaven. He is declared 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

to be the original fountain of all force, of all life, and of 
all intelligence. Of Him, and through Him, and for 
Him are all things. 

Very different from all this are the sentiments not 
infrequently put forth in the present day. Among the 
votaries of Natural Science we discover a class that 
manifest a constant disposition to remove God from all 
connection with His works, and to deny Him any partici- 
pation in the government of the world His hands have 
made. By these, the association of God's agency with 
any of the operations of nature, if not openly denied, is 
studiously avoided. This is notably the case throughout 
the Cosmos of the distinguished Humboldt. Others of 
this class, like Herbert Spencer, choose, or seem to 
choose, to ignore the Divine Being under such vague 
phrases as the unknown, and the ttnJmoioahle. Natural 
phenomena, of whatever kind, these tell us, are to be 
ascribed to physical laws, or the properties of matter. 
Having reached these, we are to push our inquiries no 
further, we are to look no further ; all beyond is " the 
unknown." And any attempt to go behind these laws 
and properties is regarded as an evidence of humble 
intellect, defective education, or religious superstition. 
All things, we are perpetually reminded, are under " the 
reign of Law." Hence, if we inquire after the origin of 
this arrangement, or the agent in that combination, or 
the cause of yonder revolution, we are promptly met 
with the decisive answer that the one is due to the laws 
of magnetism, the other to the laws of chemical affinity, 
and the third to the laws of gravitation. With this we 



62 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

are required to be satisfied ; here we are bidden to stop. 
" It is useless to inquire after any cause beyond these," 
we are told ; " all we can ever attain to is the observa- 
tion and registry of constant laws of phenomenal 
sequence ; phenomenon succeeds to phenomenon, event 
to event, according to certain rules, which are all we 
have any business to inquire into." Thus Natural Laws 
have come to cast out Nature's Creator, and the Proper- 
ties of Matter to assume all the functions of His divine 
attributes. 

The light in which this class of men would have us 
view the operations and productions of nature, and the 
whole government of the world, therefore, is widely 
different from that in which the Divine Teacher instructs 
us to regard them. This difference, which must be to 
every devout mind a most serious and important one, 
we propose to discuss in the present chapter. And in 
order to a clear understanding of the subject, it will be 
necessary, first, to inquire in what sense the term Law, 
or Laws, can be properly applied to material things ; 
and then to consider the more immediate bearing of 
these Laws on the matter of Religion — particularly Provi- 
dence and Prayer. 

I. Laws of Nature — Their True Import. 

The study and application of physical science consti- 
tute the distinguishing characteristic of the present age. 
We cannot read a periodical or enter a lecture-room 
without meeting with some reference to it. Yet while 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 63 

we thus perpetually hear and read of physical laws — the 
laws of nature, the laws of matter — nothing can be more 
inaccurate than the conceptions of many concerning 
these laws; nothing more vague or meaningless than 
the language they employ in speaking of them. For the 
want of a clear perception of the special and limited 
sense in which Law can be predicated of the phenomena 
of the world, ideas essentially distinct are often con- 
founded under common terms. 

The Laws of Nature are often represented and referred 
to as if they were agents, or efficient causes. To see the 
absurdity of this, we need but consider what Law implies. 
Law, in the proper and primary sense of the word, is 
the expression of the will of Intelligence to beings that have 
the capacity to understand and the poioer to obey it. A 
law, in this the proper sense of the term, therefore, can- 
not be addressed to nature, or lifeless and unconscious 
matter; for matter is wholly incapable of it. Matter 
cannot hear laws, matter cannot understand laws, matter 
cannot obey laws ; it can no more move and form itself 
into a blade of grass, or a grain of mustard seed, than a 
dead man can write a book or build a house. And not 
only this- — a law is simply a ride, and not an agent, or a 
cause, or an instrument. A law is not a doer, but a 
mode of doing. A law, whether human or divine, does 
nothing; but simply prescribes how this or that shall 
be done. To say, therefore, that this is done, or that is 
effected by a law of nature, is to use words without 
meaning. 

Again : we are frequently told that matter operates 



64 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

thus and so in virtue of a law impressed upon it. But 
what are we to understand by this? What truth or 
meaning can we extract from such an expression ? None 
whatever. The idea of the Almighty impressing laws 
upon material substances at their creation, under which 
they of themselves must forever continue to act, is a 
pure fancy, imposing upon us by sounds, which, on ex- 
amination, are found to have no significance. If by these 
" impressed laws," we are to understand the announced 
will or purpose of God (for what else can be intended ? ) 
then we say that neither the atmosphere, nor the ocean, 
nor the solid substance of the globe, is capable of under- 
standing the announcement, or of retaining the knowl- 
edge of it. They cannot receive the command, and they 
cannot obey it. The volition or purpose of the Divine 
Mind cannot be contained within them, and cannot be 
imparted to them. This can be true of a person only— 
of unconscious matter never. Besides, a law, impressed 
or unimpressed, being, as before stated, simply a Kule, 
and not an agent, can of itself exert no force, effect no 
change, produce no result. 

From the foregoing erroneous ideas respecting the laws 
of nature, the world in which we live has come to be 
regarded by some as a self-acting machine. The concep- 
tion of those who entertain this theory is, that at some 
very remote period, which cannot now be defined, God by 
an act of omnipotence called into being the elementary 
materials of the earth, and of the universe ; that He in 
that hour impressed all the various substances created 
with their respective self-acting properties and laws — 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 65 

that He then withdrew His agency, leaving them to 
pursue their fixed and inevitable course of self-develop- 
ment into a well-ordered world, that in time should 
abound with displays of order, objects of beauty, and 
scenes of grandeur ; and finally, with all the forms and 
activities of happy life — and that He has continued ever 
since a mere spectator of the works of His hands. " There 
is no more need of His power," it is said, " for all things 
in the universe are so constituted, so governed by law, so 
fitted into one another, that by mutual action and reaction 
the whole machinery of the world is kept in unceasing 
motion, self-guided, self-adjusted, self-energized."* This, 
assuredly, is to make creation an independent existence. 
After the primary act, according to this view, the Creator 
might have ceased to be, as far as the create universe 
is concerned ; for it could proceed to all eternity without 
Him. But then, He is allowed the credit, and, what 
is called "the greater honor," of having contrived a 
machine, a universe of clock-work, that ever winds itself 
up as fast as it runs down, and so keeps in perpetual and 
self-sustained motion. Thus the Most High is cour- 
teously deposed, and complimentally dismissed from His 
own dominions. Since the hour of creation He has had 
no connection with His works ; His personal agency has 
never been put forth among them. He has remained in 
complete inactivity; His wisdom, power and goodness 
have lain dormant. He simply exists — a mere spiritual 
passivity — a philosophical abstraction ! In this manner 



* Warington's Week of Creation , p. 91. 



66 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

this class of " our men of science/' instead of leading us 
forward to more exalted and worthy views of the Divine 
character, carry us back to the religion of the Brahmin, 
which teaches that " God is a spirit existing in a state 
of eternal repose." Surely herein we have "Atheism 
with a God"!* 

"What then are the Laws of Nature, correctly ex- 
pressed, and rightly understood? The term Law is 
used in the Natural Sciences in three senses, which are 
to be carefully distinguished. 

First. Law is employed to denote a uniform order 
of facts ; such as that all birds are oviparous ; that the 
right and left sides of all vertebrate animals correspond 
in their members and organs ; that all the leaves on any 
particular tree are formed after the same pattern ; that 
the offspring is of the same species as the parent ; etc. 
Such an order of facts as either of these is called a Gen- 
eral Law. Now, when the term is used in this sense, 
we cannot speak of the action of Law, or that it pro- 
duces any result; for it does not include the idea of 
force, or causality ; but simply expresses an established 
order of facts. Yet "the mere ticketing and orderly 
assortment of such facts," under the name of Law, " is 
constantly spoken of as if it were in the nature of expla- 
nation, and as if no higher truth in respect to such 
natural phenomena were to be attained or desired." f 
Whereas, in such cases, the facts give the Law, and not 

* Deus sine dominio, providentia, et causis fmalibus, nihil aliud est 
quam Fatum et Natura. Newton's Principia, Schol. in fine, 
t Argyll's Reign of Law, p. 3. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. (J 7 

the Law the facts. Law, therefore, in this sense effects 
nothing, accounts for nothing, explains nothing, but is a 
mere statement of what the condition of nature is. 

Second. The term Lata is used in natural science 
to denote the Properties of Matter. There are in nature 
some sixty* simple or elementary substances ; and all 
things on the earth are a combination of more or less of 
these, as all the words in our language are a combina- 
tion of a greater or less number of the letters of the 
alphabet. These substances are so constituted as to 
affect or influence one another variously. The power 
which one substance has of changing another, or its 
susceptibility of being changed by another, is called a 
property of that substance; and all substances have 
their definite and fixed properties. Gravitation is such 
a property of matter; all matter attracts all other 
matter with a force that is in proportion "directly as 
the mass, and inversely as the square of the distance ; " 
and this is called the Law of Gravitation. The exact 
numerical proportions, in which the several gases com- 
bine, are properties of these gases, and are called the 
Laws of Affinity. Light, heat, electricity and magnetism 
have their respective properties, working according to 
precise and uniform rules, and which are termed the 

* The number of what have been regarded as elementary substances 
has varied with the progress of science ; at present they are put down 
at sixty-three. Of these oxygen alone forms one-half the mass of the 
whole globe ; silicon, one-fourth ; aluminum, magnesium, calcium, 
potassium, sodium, iron, carbon, sulphur, hydrogen, and nitrogen 
make up nearly the other one-fourth ; the remaining fifty-two elements 
do not constitute altogether more than one-hundredth part of the globe. 



68 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

Laws of these elements. Now, this class of laws, like 
the former, cannot be said to effect anything, or to 
account for anything. Law in this sense is simply a 
generalized statement of the forces or susceptibilities 
which belong to different substances. 

All the properties of any given substance have a refer- 
ence or adaptation to those of some other substance or 
substances, otherwise no change could be effected or sus- 
tained. In other words, there is a certain constitutional 
relation between the properties of different substances 
whereby they are capable of affecting others, or are sus- 
ceptible of being affected by them. Without this no 
change or combination can take place. Oil and water, 
for example, will not mix, for the relation of mutual 
affinity does not exist between them ; but between spirits 
and water this is found, and they will readily combine. 
All action or change originates in the combined opera- 
tion of two or more material substances, and implies a 
relation between their properties so as to admit of their 
mutual action. And this brings us to 

A Third sense, in which Law is used, namely, To 
denote the action of hoo or more substances, so related and 
adjusted as to produce effect. This is the most common 
and also the most important sense in which Law is used 
in natural science. 

Each elementary substance, as already stated, has its 
own properties, its own combining proportions, to which 
it is bound with mathematical precision ; so that except 
in these proportions no chemical union can take place 
at all. The proportions, by weight, in which the gases 
combine are as follows : 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 69 



Hydrogen. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. 

Carbon 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, etc. 

Oxygen 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, etc. 

Nitrogen 14, 28, 42, 56, 70, etc. 



That is, 1 ounce of hydrogen will combine with 6 ounces 
of carbon, or with 8 of oxygen, or with 14 of nitrogen. 
Or again, 6 ounces of carbon will combine with 8 of 
oxygen, or with 14 of nitrogen. Or, 8 of oxygen will 
combine with 14 of nitrogen. And so of the other 
figures. Nothing can be more perfect than the manner 
in which this order of combination is regulated. For 
illustration : to form icater it is necessary to have 1 part 
of hydrogen and 8 parts of oxygen ; and if there be a 
different proportion, say 1 part of hydrogen and 10 parts 
of oxygen, then there will be only 8 parts of the oxygen 
absorbed in joining one part of hydrogen to make water, 
and 2 parts will remain free and unchanged. 

Again : oxygen will unite with 14 parts of nitrogen, 
by weighty in the following proportions, and yield the 
following results : 



NITROGEN. 




OXTGEN. 


Products. 


14 


+ 


8 = 


Protoxide of nitrogen. 


14 


+ 


16 = 


Deutoxide of nitrogen. 


14 


+ 


24 = 


Hyponitrous acid. 


14 


+ 


32 = 


Nitrous acid. 


14 


4- 


40 = 


Nitric acid. 



Equally simple and uniform is the law of combination 
by volume. Take for example the five compounds of 
oxygen and nitrogen as above : 

Oxygen. Nitrogen. Products. 

2 4 1 = Protoxide of nitrogen. 

2 -f* 2 = Deutoxide of nitrogen. 

2 4- 3 = Hyponitrous acid. 

2 4- 4 = Nitrous acid. 

2 4- 5 = Nitric acid. 



70 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

Again : it is a general Law that when compound 
bodies combine in more than one proportion, that every 
additional union represents a multiple of the combining 
proportion of the first. This will be illustrated by the 
following Table : 





= 8 p. oxy. 


+ 


1 p. hyd. 




9 




= 8 


+ 


14 


nit. 




22 


Oxide of chlorine... 


= 8 


+ 


36 


chlor. 




44 




= 8 


+ 


40 


potas. 




48 


Oxide of platinum. . 


= 8 


+ 


96 


plat. 




104 




= 8 


+ 


110 


silv. 




118 


Oxide of mercury.. 


= 8 " 


+ 


200 


mer. 




208 



In these proportions, or in multiples of them, and in no 
others, will these bodies unite with the acids or other 
compounds. 

Once more : the composition of bodies is fixed and 
invariable; that is, they consist of the same elements 
united in the same proportions, wherever found or how- 
ever produced. For example, Chalk, whether formed by 
nature, or by the chemist, is composed of 43*71 parts of 
carbonic acid, and 56*29 parts of lime. Again: the 
Rust of Iron, by the action of the atmosphere, is as in- 
variable in its composition, as if it had been formed by 
the most delicate adjustment of weight, by the most 
accurate chemist, being 28 parts of iron, and 12 parts of 
oxygen. Again, take Salt; if we mix 23 ounces of 
sodium and 35*5 ounces of chlorine, they will exactly 
unite; the whole of both elements will disappear, and 
become merged in the compound, which is our common 
salt. But if we bring together 24 ounces of sodium, and 
35*5 ounces of chlorine, the extra ounce of sodium will 
be left aside, while the rest will unite as before. Thus 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 71 

the composition of material bodies is fixed and invariable. 
Numerical exactitude lies at the root of all things in 
nature, so that it is literally a scientific truth that " the 
mountains have been weighed in scales, and the hills in 
a balance." 

Such are a few samples of the exact and beautiful 
Laws of combination which exist between the elementary 
substances which compose our globe and all its furniture. 
According to these Laws all the combinations which we 
discover in nature take place. All the substances com- 
posing the mineral kingdom ; all the various productions 
of the vegetable world — their woody fibres and diverse 
juices — their flowers, fruits and seeds — the acids, the 
gums, the resins, and the sugar which plants produce ; 
and those yet more complicated animal substances — 
bone, muscle, blood and bile — albumen, caseine, milk ; 
are all produced in strict accordance with these Laws. 

And now to come back to the question under discus- 
sion — Can Law in this third sense, as above illustrated, 
be said to produce or effect any result ? Can we, in any 
proper or intelligible sense of the term, ascribe to it any 
of the phenomena of nature as their producing cause ? 
We answer, No. In all these and similar combinations 
an action, indeed, takes place — a union is formed between 
different elements, often giving birth to a body altogether 
dissimilar from them all. But the Law does not give us 
these combinations, but the combinations give the Law ; 
and apart from the combinations, the Law has no exist- 
ence. Instead of the Law producing these phenomena, 
it may be more truly said that the phenomena produce 



72 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

the Law ; just as a sum in arithmetic gives the answer 
rather than the answer the sum. It cannot, therefore, 
in any correct or truthful sense of language, be said that 
these Laws do anything, or account for anything. 

What, then, is the force, the mysterious impulse by 
which atoms and molecules are moved and guided so 
unerringly in their combinations ? Science calls it elec- 
tive affinity. But what is affinity ? A name, which, in 
our ignorance, we are compelled to give to an unknoivn 
power — a power that eludes and defies all our attempts 
to investigate it. " We habitually speak of the attrac- 
tion and repulsion, of the affinity and non-affinity of 
bodies," says Eobert Hunt, " and write learnedly upon 
the laws of these forces. After all it would be more 
honest to admit, that we know no more of the secret 
impulses which regulate the combinations of matter, 
than did those in days gone by who satisfied themselves 
by referring all phenomena of these kinds to sympathies 
and antipathies." * 

"Affinity and gravitation are both primary laws, and 
for these as for every other physical law, no cause can 
be assigned, except the Divine Will."*)* The laws of 
affinity, or the rules according to which elementary sub- 
stances combine — their proportions, their arithmetical 
series, their undeviating multiples — do most clearly and 
forcibly point to an intelligence behind them, by which 
they have been arranged and established, and to a power 
over them, by which they are thus e ver maintained. The 

* Poetry of Science, p. 218. 

t Murray's Habit and Intelligence, Vol. I. p. 43. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 73 

eye no sooner falls upon the very figures, expressing such 
remarkable relations and quantities, than the conviction 
flashes irresistibly through the mind, that they must be 
the arrangements of wisdom, and that the results which 
fall out infallibly according to these figures must be the 
effects of a presiding and efficient Will. Indeed we feel 
that to deny that Mind must be concerned in them, that 
they express will and intelligence, we must deny our own 
reason and consciousness. Thus Natural Laws, when 
rightly understood, conduct us directly to a Being be- 
yond and above nature — its Author, its God. Even the 
author of The Vestiges of Creation is forced to this ac- 
knowledgment — " The laws of nature is but another 
phrase for the action of the ever-present and sustain- 
ing God."* 

"All our science," says Dr. Carpenter, "is but an 
investigation of the mode in which the Creator acts ; its 
highest laws are but expressions of the mode in which 
He manifests his agency to us. He is the efficient cause 
alike for the simplest and most minute, and of the 
most complicated and most majestic phenomena of the 
universe." f 

This great truth will be further evident from a con- 
sideration of a more fundamental nature. The various 
material substances, which compose the earth, have not 
only been created by God, but are every moment depend- 
ent upon his power for their continuance in being. As 
material things did not come into existence of them- 



* Vestiges, p. 10, tenth edition. 

t General and Comparative Physiology, p. 1080. 



74 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

selves, so neither can they continue in existence of their 
own power. No thing, no being, save God, can be self- 
existent for an instant. The Almighty — we speak with 
reverence — could not have created such a thing or being. 
He could not have communicated the attribute of self- 
existence; this, like his omniscience and omnipotence, 
belongs exclusively to his own eternal and mysterious 
Being. His attributes are a unitive perfection, and in- 
communicable. Hence, it is certain, that the ground 
of the existence of every element, and every atom of 
matter, is not in itself, but wholly and only in the will 
and sustaining power of the Creator. Matter continues 
in being because He wills that it shall continue. Under- 
neath it, and in it, sustaining it, entirely causing it, are 
the Almighty will and power. Let these be withdrawn 
for a second, let there be no present divine volition, no 
present emanation of divine power, and that moment 
it is nothing; that moment it sinks into annihilation, 
or vanishes as doth a man's image from a mirror, when 
he withdraws from before it, for the sole ground of its 
being is gone.* " He upholdeth all things by the word 
of His power; and by Him all things consist." His 
active omnipotence each moment floods all nature. The 
whole order of the universe is simply the effect of His 
infinite power and wisdom. 

It is gratifying to every devout mind to observe that 
the most recent advances of natural science have been 
steadily converging toward this scriptural view. We 



* See Dr. J. Young's Creator and Creation, Chap. II. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 75 

refer more particularly to what is called " The doctrine 
of the Conservation and Correlation of Physical Forces." 
Matter and force are alike indestructible. Matter can 
neither be produced nor destroyed ; its form or condition 
may vary endlessly, but its amount remains the same. 
Wood may be burned, and water may be evaporated, 
and become invisible, but they are not lost ; both still 
exist in the condition of gases. Not a grain of matter 
has been lost from the world, and not a grain has been 
added to it, since the day of its creation. The same is 
true of force or energy. The sum of force, actual and 
potential, in the whole universe, is always one and the 
same; it cannot be increased, and it cannot be dimin- 
ished. But while the forces of nature are indestructible, 
they are, like matter, changeable. One force is trans- 
missible into another force. In other words, as a particu- 
lar force disappears under one character, it reappears 
under another. A railroad train is stopped by the action 
of the brake ; in that case the force of motion, which has 
disappeared, is transformed into heat, which manifests 
itself along every inch and at every point of friction. So 
light runs into heat, heat into electricity, electricity into 
magnetism, magnetism into mechanical force ; and me- 
chanical force again into light and heat. Hence it is 
held that all these are, substantially, one and the same 
force. " The more we know of nature," says the Duke 
of Argyll, " the more certain it appears that a multi- 
plicity of separate forces does not exist, but that all 
her forces pass into each other, and are but modifica- 
tions of some One Force, which is the source and centre 



76 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

of the rest."* This is now regarded generally as an 
established truth. And how sublime is the thought: 
but One Power in the whole vast and complicated uni- 
verse ! manifesting itself now in gravity, now in electric 
flashes, now in chemical affinity, now in heat and motion, 
now in magnetism, now in the growth of plants and 
animals. This stands among the grandest of all scien- 
tific discoveries. 

Now, the profoundest minds of the present day regard 
this One Force, not as a general property of matter, not 
as something apart from God or independent of Him, 
but as the very 'power of God himself. That earnest 
Christian, and prince of chemists, Faraday, at the close 
of a life of profound study and most splendid discoveries, 
came to believe that all force is icill-force ; and, as a 
consequence, that the whole universe is not merely 
dependent on, but is actuated in every part and particle 
by the will of the Supreme Being. The foremost of 
modern astronomers, Sir John Herschel, does not hesi- 
tate to say, that " it is but reasonable to regard the force 
of Gravitation as the direct or indirect result of a Con- 
sciousness or a Will existing somewhere." f And Pro- 
fessor William Whewell, no less distinguished as a 
mathematician, says, " The agency of the Divine Being 
pervades every portion of the universe, producing all 
action and passion, all permanence and change." J 
President McCosh, speaking of this doctrine of "One 
Force," says, " It furnishes a more striking manifestation 



* Eeign of Law, p. 275. f Outlines of Astronomy, p. 291. 

t IVth Bridgwater Treatise, p. 185. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 77 

than anything known before of the One God, with his in- 
finitely varied perfections — of his power, his knowledge, 
his wisdom, his love, his mercy; it bids us see that 
one power blowing in the breeze, sparkling in the stars, 
quickening us as we bound along in the felt enjoyment 
of health, efflorescing in every form and line of beauty, 
and showering down daily gifts upon us." * 

Thus the most recent and the grandest achievements 
of modern investigation carry us directly back to the 
plain and simple teachings of that priceless book, the 
New Testament. And thus true science ascribes to the 
great God the honor, which to Him alone belongs, but 
which perverted reason would thrust upon what it 
vaguely terms the " laws of nature." Always, and every- 
where, did the Divine Instructor proclaim to men, that 
it is God who makes everything, plans everything, gov- 
erns everything — that He maketh the sun to rise, the 
seasons to revolve, and food to spring out of the earth — 
that His active and unfailing providence is over every 
living man, every blushing lily, every fluttering sparrow, 
every falling hair. And now, after so long a time, we 
behold the great masters of modern science come to 
his feet, and, in willing response, say, "Amen : even so, 
Lord Jesus." 

Beautifully, indeed, do all the statements and allu- 
sions of the Gospel, respecting the phenomena of nature, 
harmonize with the discoveries, and even the refinements 
of science. Had Jesus of Nazareth lived in the present 



* Christianity and Positivism, p. 14, 



78 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

day, and been familiar with all the discoveries of Newton 
and Herschel, Davy and Faraday, Owen and Agassiz, 
he could not have chosen happier terms, or employed 
language more strictly and philosophically correct, for 
public instruction, than he actually did. Nothing that 
is contradictory, nothing that is at variance with the 
established facts of nature, is to be found in any of his 
sentiments, or illustrations, or inimitable parables. No 
candid eye however keen, no honest mind however 
searching, has ever detected a single discrepancy be- 
tween the record of science and the record of the evan- 
gelists. This is what cannot be said of the sacred writ- 
ings of any other religion than Christianity. " The 
Shasters of the Hindoos contain false astronomy, as well 
as false anatomy and physiology; and the Koran of 
Mohammed distinctly avows the Ptolemaic system of the 
heavenly bodies ; and so interwoven are these scientific 
errors with the religions of these sacred books, that when 
you have proved the former you have disproved the 
latter. But the Bible, stating only facts, and adopting 
no system of human philosophy, has ever stood, and 
ever shall stand, in sublime simplicity and undecaying 
strength ; while the winds and the waves of conflicting 
human opinions roar and dash harmlessly around, and 
the wrecks of a thousand false systems of philosophy 
and religion are strewed along its base." * 



Hitchcock's Highest Use of Learning, p. 36. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 



79 



II. Laws of Nature — Their Relation to Providence. 

From the numerous quotations made in the preceding 
part of this chapter, it is sufficiently evident that the 
New Testament Scriptures teach us, that the Great 
Creator exercises a Providence, a controlling and direct- 
ing power, a care and superintendence, over all that 
exists or takes place in the world, and in the universe. 
This is one of the most prominent doctrines contained 
in them, and is set forth clearly, repeatedly, and in 
almost every varied form of expression. No fact or 
truth could be stated more definitely and. emphatically. 

It is further to be observed, that the doctrine of provi- 
dence is not simply to be found among other things in 
this sacred volume, but is a component and essential 
part of the system of truth which it sets forth. It is 
interwoven with that system throughout. It underlies 
its predictions and promises, it is recognized in its ad- 
monitions and encouragements, it enters into the duties 
it enjoins and the hopes it inspires ; it stands in vital 
connection with the offering of prayers and the expecta- 
tion of an answer to those prayers. So that with this 
doctrine the whole of the Christian Religion must stand 
or fall. 

Now, few readers need be informed, that the Mate- 
rialists of the present day, a class of men who deify the 
Laws of Nature, hold that the universal and immutable 
reign of these laws, observed throughout the universe, 
admits not of the exercise of any such providence or 
government on the part of God. Divine agency or inter- 



80 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 



position in the government of the world, such as provi- 
dence implies, it is assumed, must necessarily be in 
conflict with natural laws — must occasionally, at least, 
interrupt or suspend their uniform operation.* But as 
no such interruption or suspension ever appears in any 
department or province of creation, it is inferred and 
boldly asserted that there can be no such providence as 
that taught by Christ and his apostles. The silent and 
unde viating march of natural order, discovered by science, 
we are told, leaves no room for personal agency ; physical 
laws are unalterable in their action, and neither change 
nor bend, nor yield, either to accomplish or to defeat any 
result in which the interests of mortals may be involved. 
Accordingly we hear perpetually from this class of teach- 
ers of the fixed properties of matter — of the immutable 
forces of nature — of rigid and universal sequence, neces- 
sary, invariable — of unbroken chains of cause and effect, 
no link of which, in the nature of things, can be severed 
or dispensed with. Thus they can allow no place for 
Divine Providence, no room for prayer, no hope or com- 
fort for the suppliant. Stoically it is asked — 

" Think we, like some weak prince, the Eternal Cause, 
Prone for his favorites to reverse his laws ; 
Shall burning Etna, if a sage requires, 
Forget to thunder, and recall her fires ; 
On air or sea, new motions be impressed, 
Oh, blameless Bethel, to relieve thy breast ; 
When the loose mountain trembles from on high, 
Shall gravitation cease if you go by?"f 

* See Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences, by Lewes, pp. 102, 103. 
t Pope's Essay on Man, V. 121-128. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. gl 

Hence we see, that according to this school of cold and 
comfortless philosophy nothing is left but for all to 
accept their inevitable fate as determined by the relent- 
less Laws of Nature. 

Such views and sentiments as these are obviously in 
plain and direct opposition to those taught by the Great 
Master. And no true disciple of his can hear them 
announced without experiencing a painful shock through 
all the most sacred sensibilities of his soul. But do the 
established conclusions of science bind us to accept them ? 
Do the demonstrated facts of nature all array themselves, 
as materialists would have us believe, against the doc- 
trine of providence ? Are we brought by the discoveries 
of the day where we must unresistingly yield to be thus 
stripped of what we have ever fondly believed to have 
been over us — the care and protection of our Father 
in heaven ? Are we hopelessly shut up to this dreary 
conclusion, that we are after all left to the mercy of 
inexorable laws, the helpless sport of blind and resistless 
elements ? In the answer that may be given to these 
vital questions, every reflecting mind must feel an interest 
the most profound. And this is the point to the con- 
sideration of which we now advance. 

It is true, indeed, that what are called the properties 
or forces of matter act according to uniform and invaria- 
ble laws. Gravitation acts always and everywhere ac- 
cording to the same rule. Chemical combinations take 
place always and everywhere in the same inflexible pro- 
portions. The forces of light, heat and sound work 
always and everywhere after the same fixed and definite 

6 



82 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

modes. Magnetism and electricity operate always and 
everywhere in strict conformity to the same regulations. 
The searching investigations of philosophers have never 
detected one of these elements acting at variance with 
its established law ; nor have scientific experiments been 
able to torture one of them for an instant, or in the 
slightest degree, to depart from its fixed rule. Each 
individual force of nature works under the same meas- 
ures, weights, numbers and restrictions, in the deep sea 
and in the solid ground, in the rocky mountain and in the 
dancing mote, in the dew-drop and in the sand-grain, in 
the waves that restlessly rise and sink, and in the clouds 
that are rifted, or woven, or scattered before the wind. 

All this is true ; but it is only a part of the truth. 
While all this is admitted to be a fact, there is another 
fact quite as prominent and quite as certain, and which 
is this — that these individual forces or laws, according 
as they are combined, or opposed, or balanced one against 
another, in their operations, are capable of producing 
results infinite in number, and infinitely diversified. No 
one law or force determines anything that we see take 
place or done around us. Every production, every result 
that we behold in nature is the effect of different forces 
nicely balanced against each other. And the least dis- 
turbance, in which any one force is allowed by other 
forces to tell in an operation, produces a total change in 
the result. While it is entirely true that every law or 
force is, in its own nature, invariable ; yet it produces 
the same effect only when it works under the same 
conditions in reference to other laws or forces. When 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 33 

these conditions are changed, the effect in like manner 
will be changed. And as these conditions are actually 
susceptible of endless variations, the result may be end- 
lessly varied. 

It should be carefully observed, and ever be remem- 
bered, therefore, that there is only one sense in which it 
is true that any Law of nature is immutable, and that 
is the sense in which law is employed to designate an in- 
dividual force. In all other senses in which the term 
is used, Laws are not immutable ; on the contrary, they 
are the unceasing instruments of change. " No one of 
the agents, such as light, heat, the elasticity of vapors, 
and electricity, which perform so important a part in 
the aerial ocean, can exercise any influence without the 
result produced being speedily modified by the simulta- 
neous intervention of all the other agents." * 

" When, therefore, scientific men speak, as they often 
do, of all phenomena being governed by invariable laws, 
they use language which is ambiguous, and in most cases 
they use it in a sense which covers an erroneous idea of 
the facts. There are no phenomena visible to man of 
which it is true to say that they are governed by any 
invariable force. That which does govern them is always 
some variable combinations of invariable forces. But 
this makes all the difference in reasoning on the relation 
of Will to Law, of providence to physical affairs ; this 
is the one essential distinction to be admitted and ob- 
served. There is no observed Order of facts which is not 



* Humboldt's Cosmos. 



84 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

due to a combination of Forces ; and there is no combina- 
tion of Forces which is invariable — none which are not 
capable of change in infinite degrees. In these senses — 
and these are the common senses in which Law is used 
to express the phenomena of nature — Law is nof rigid, 
it is not immutable, it is not invariable, but it is, on the 
contrary, pliable, subtle, various." * 

Here, it may be worth while to glance at a few ex- 
amples of the variable results that may be effected by 
invariable laws, operating in different combinations. The 
number of elementary substances, as before stated, is 
some sixty only, yet by different combinations of the 
fixed properties of this comparatively small number, all 
the vast variety of organized and unorganized existences, 
which diversify, and furnish and adorn the whole world 
have been produced. All the Forces of nature operate 
uniformly according to the same Laws throughout the 
year ; yet by different combinations of these Forces, we 
have the ice and snow and barrenness of winter at 
one period, and the glory and luxuriance of summer at 
another. The clouds which overspread the face of the 
sky are perpetually changing their forms and positions 
and colors, but no Law of nature is violated or sus- 
pended ; all is the result of different and shifting com- 
binations of those Laws. The state of the weather is 
in continual fluctuation ; to-day it is wet, or cloudy, or 
windy; to-morrow it may be dry, or warm, or calm; 
yet all the individual Forces of nature are in uniform 



* Argyll's Beign of Law, p. 98. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 85 

operation ; the change is simply owing to different bal- 
ancings of those forces. It is the common course of 
nature that like produce like; yet occasionally from 
perfect animals and perfect vegetables, monstrosities of 
organizations do occur; in the production of these no 
miracle is wrought, no physical Law is perverted ; but 
the conditions under which Laws operate, in some par- 
ticular or particulars, differ from the ordinary conditions. 
Human beings generally are so constituted that if cer- 
tain substances, called poisons, be introduced into their 
systems, they will be destroyed ; but now and then God 
produces a man who suffers no harm from them, and is 
even nourished by these agents so fatal to others ; this 
impunity is not owing to any miraculous suspension of 
the poisonous properties of those substances, but to some 
peculiar physical conditions of such individuals. It has 
long been the course of this world that " seed time and 
harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and 
night," have returned to mankind in regular and benefi- 
cent recurrence ; yet there has been such a thing as a 
general deluge, produced by a deep and widespread con- 
vulsion of the solid crust of the globe ; — yea, if we may 
credit Geology, many repetitions of such a catastrophe ; 
still there was in all these, our enemies being judges, no 
miracle, no contravention or suspension of established 
physical Laws ; they were the necessary results of cer- 
tain combinations of the unchangeable Forces of nature. 
The planet on which we live, under the moulding hand 
of God, at one period of its history, was one molten and 
glowing mass enveloped in a vast and fearful atmosphere 



86 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

of seething steam; at another, encased in icy glaciers 
and lasting snows from pole to pole ; and at the present 
period we find it enjoying every pleasing diversity both 
of soil and climate, and abounding in scenes of loveliness 
and grandeur : yet in all these marvellous revolutions 
there has been, Materialists themselves being our au- 
thority, no departure from the regular operations of 
physical Laws. — Such are a few illustrations of what 
variable results may be brought about by the action of 
invariable Laws, when acting under different conditions. 

From the foregoing facts, it is evident, that the earth 
and the sea and the air might be made to pass through 
almost any imaginable changes;- and that the living 
inhabitants of the world might be subjected to any sort 
or amount of physical evil, or be favored with any kind 
or degree of material good — might be visited with a 
drought or a deluge, with fruitful seasons or blighted 
fields, with an atmosphere that is salubrious or pestilen- 
tial — without the slightest interference with the uniform 
operation of any one Law of nature. The fixedness of 
physical Laws, therefore, does not, as Materialists set 
forth, necessarily exclude Divine interposition. All the 
Providence which the Scriptures teach may be, and is 
exercised by the adjustment — by the crossing, or the 
balancing, or the opposing, of fixed Laws. So far are 
the fixed and invariable Laws of nature from excluding 
divine direction and control, that they demand it, and 
are the very instruments which God needs and employs 
to work out his sovereign will toward our whole race, 
and toward every living thing. In the endless combina- 



THE LAWS. OF NATURE. 87 

tions of which the established Laws of creation are 
susceptible, God has ready to his hand suitable and 
abundant resources to bring about whatever change or 
vicissitude his infinite wisdom may see necessary for 
the government of the world, without recourse to any 
miraculous interposition. 

All the conceptions we can form of God, as an omni- 
present, omniscient, and omnipotent Being, bind us to 
believe that he is present — present in his entire God- 
head — at each point of space, and through each instant 
of time ; that He momentarily stands in immediate and 
active connection with every particle of matter in the 
universe — as immediate and active as in the moment 
He created it. He may, therefore, interpose among 
physical agents, for their mutual adjustment, beyond 
the reach of man's vision or sagacity ;, may determine 
their balancings where human science can neither trace 
nor human instruments detect the influence of his power, 
where all the workings of Laws known to man are lost 
and vanish in the Divine volition, whence all Laws and 
all Forces are derived. And all this interposition may 
be carried on, not arbitrarily or irregularly, but accord- 
ing to a uniform Law, but a higher Law than it is in 
the power of man to reach, a Law that has its field of 
operation among " the hidings of God's power." In this 
lofty and impenetrable sphere, therefore, Divine Provi- 
dence may hold its empire for the accomplishment of 
all its purposes. From this hidden and inexhaustible 
magazine of combinations, the Governor of the world can 
draw with infallible skill the agencies of his dispensa- 



88 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

tions toward every human being and everything that 
hath life. We hold, therefore, that God can thus exer- 
cise, as the Scriptures emphatically declare, a special 
providence over the interests of the world at large, and 
of each individual in it, in perfect harmony icith all the 
known Laivs of Nature. Nor has science, among all its 
accumulated discoveries, a single fact to offer that is 
opposed to, or at variance with this view; and more 
than this, neither will science ever be able to adduce, 
whatever its future triumphs may prove, a single such 
fact, for the matter lies wholly and forever beyond the 
reach of its investigations. 

The argument, drawn against the doctrine of Divine 
Providence from the fixedness of the Laws of Nature, 
therefore, is without weight or power, and falls harmlessly 
to the ground ; like a spent ball, it loses all its force long 
before it reaches the mark it was designed to strike. 

All the deep-seated instincts of human nature, and all 
the profoundest researches of philosophy, alike point to 
the Eternal Mind as the one and only source of power. 
The notion that the world is a self-adjusting and self- 
regulating machine is as shallow as it is unphilosophical. 
The mechanic constructs his little engine, and can leave 
it to work at its intended purpose ; and hence some have 
leaped at the conclusion that God has done the same 
with regard to the world. But there is no parallel, no 
relation, between the two cases to offer the slightest foot- 
hold for the comparison. The two contrivances and 
the two contrivers are both essentially different in their 
nature. Man leaves his machine to be conducted by 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 39 

the Laws of nature — by the force of gravitation, or the 
pressure of steam, or the currents of the air, that is, by 
the agency of the Creator ; but if God should leave his 
work, there is no other God by whose agency it will 
be carried on. Let Him withdraw his power, and all 
motion on the earth and in the heavens comes to an end ; 
or let Him suspend his governance, and the universe 
rushes into ruin. As it required omniscience and om- 
nipotence to produce the world, so it requires the un- 
remitted exercise of the same Divine attributes to pre- 
serve and govern it. And the real philosopher no less 
than the true Christian rejoices that the Lord God 
omnipotent reigneth over all.* 



* The distinguished Dr. William B. Carpenter, late President of " The 
British Association for the Advancement of Science," in his masterly 
address on retiring from the chair, administered a severe but just rebuke 
to those who seek to array the facts of science against the truths of 
Revelation. Among other things, he said — "When science, passing 
beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place of Theology, and sets 
up its own conception of the order of nature, as a sufficient account of 
its cause, it is invading a province of thought to which it has no claim. 
... To set up these Laws as self-acting, and as either excluding or 
rendering unnecessary the power which alone can give them effect, ap- 
pears to me as arrogant as it is unphilosophical. To speak of any Law 
as * regulating ' or 1 governing ' phenomena, is only permissible on the 
assumption that the Law is the expression of the modus operandi of the 
governing power. . . . Those who set up their own conceptions of the 
orderly sequence which they discern in the phenomena of nature as 
fixed and determinate Laws, by which those phenomena not only are 
within all human experience, but always have been and always must 6e, 
invariably governed, are really guilty of the intellectual arrogance they 
condemn in the systems of the ancients, and place themselves in dia- 
metrical antagonism to those real philosophers by whose comprehensive 
grasp and penetrating insight that order has been so far disclosed. . . . 



90 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

The history of the globe, as deciphered by the science 
of geology, presents numerous unquestionable evidences 
of a superintending and directing Providence, through 
all those vast successive periods of its formation which 
preceded the creation of man. This history exhibits 
facts, which cannot be accounted for by the action of 
Law, facts which can be ascribed only to supernatural 
wisdom and power. Of these our space will allow us to 
notice but a few, and that briefly. 

(1.) The Scriptures teach us that this material world 
is not eternal, but had a beginning ; and natural philoso- 
phy has now demonstrated this to be true. It is a crea- 
tion, effected in time. In the existence, then, of the very 
globe upon which we stand, we behold the direct exer- 
cise of God's wisdom and power. 

(2.) Nature has its laws; is, we are told, under "the 
reign of laws ; " but laws are not self-originated, nor self- 
sustained ; they must have had a Law Maker. In the 
very institution of these laws, then, again, we witness 
the presence and agency of the same divine wisdom and 
power. 

(3.) The inorganic substance of the earth offers similar 
evidences. We know of no law, or laws, that will ac- 
count for that wonderful composition and exquisite texture 
of the rocks, which made them store-houses of the very 
food which f uture plants, plants to be created after the 

That Order of nature is worshipped as itself a god by the class of inter- 
preters whose doctrine I call in question. . . . The real philosopher 
is one who always loves truth better than his system. " This address 
was delivered in the summer of 1S72. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE, §\ 

lapse of ages, would require. In the arrangement of the 
strata of rocks also, an arrangement carried on through 
unmeasured periods, we behold in every advancing step 
such an obvious regard to the constitution and wants of 
coming man, as cannot be ascribed to the blind action 
of unintelligent laws, without doing violence to Reason. 
No law or laws can be pointed out whose action would 
have determined the place, the thickness and the tex- 
ture of the strata so admirably as we find them. No 
law can be indicated which will explain how the iron, 
the silver, the gold, the coal, and the lime, all so impor- 
tant to man, have been placed just ivliere they are, so 
accessible to his hands. No action of law will rationally 
account for these adjustments and provisions. Every 
force and every substance in nature, as with an audible 
voice, disclaim the credit, and bid us look away from 
them to that presiding intelligence and controlling power, 
which all along ordered these things according to the 
counsel of the eternal Will. 

(4.) When the earth in its process of preparation had 
reached the proper stage, the Divine agency becomes still 
more manifest in the introduction of Plant-life. In this 
we have a product altogether above all physical laws. 
In this we have a new power on the earth — vital force, 
a thing which no combination of materials, and no co-op- 
eration of forces, before in existence, could produce. No 
physicist can pretend to show that it was evolved from 
pre-existing materials. "All that chemistry has achieved 
amid transformations which often startle, and always 
instruct us, has failed to organize a single form in which 



92 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

life may take up its abode. Life makes its own form, 
and plies its own force. Plant-life was a new thing in 
our world." It was a supernatural production— it was 
from God. 

(5.) At a later period, the agency of the Creator, 
never absent from the forming world, displayed itself 
more conspicuously still in the creation of Animal-life, 
This again was totally distinct from, and in essential 
respects far above, plant-life. Alike in its lowest and 
highest forms, life had its origin in God. He is the 
Giver and the Lord of all life. The idea of " spontaneous 
generation," once so boldly put forth, has been ex- 
tinguished by the experiments of M. Pasteur, whose 
investigations of this subject even Huxley has pro- 
nounced " models of experimentation and logical reason- 
ing." And Darwin himself admits that "life was first 
breathed by the Creator into two or three simple forms." 
In the introduction of life, therefore, we again behold 
the working of the Divine Hand. 

(6.) Descending still with the flow of time, we witness, 
as we approach the period of man, a series of changes 
and adjustments in the vegetation and among the living 
tenants of the sea and land, gradually preparing the 
world to be a fit habitation for him. Nature, in all her 
provinces, seems moved into co-operation for this end. 
Many of the old animals and many of the old plantal 
growths that are unfit to be his contemporaries fade out 
of existence, and the earth is stored with new plants, 
and animals, such as are more suitable to meet his wants 
and to administer to his comfort, are brought forth. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 93 

Fruit-bearing trees, such as the apple, pear, peach, plum, 
cherry, etc.; and grain-giving plants, such as wheat, 
barley, oats, etc., are now introduced. Many of the 
gigantic and destructive quadrupeds of former periods 
are weeded out, and others more suitable for the service 
of man take their place, and notably among these is the 
sheep, which would serve to supply him with both food 
and clothing. And even in the waters, a corresponding 
change takes place ; not until this comparatively recent 
period did the sea become the home of fishes whose flesh 
would prove tasteful and wholesome to man ; now it is 
that "the nutritious cod, the savory herring, the rich- 
flavored salmon, and the succulent turbot" make their 
appearance, and multiply and displace many of those 
species which were coarse and unfit for food. These 
new vegetable growths, and these new living creatures, 
all so necessary and so valuable to man, do not appear 
until close on to the era of his creation. — Now, no 
known law, or combination of laws, can account for 
these marked changes in the sea and on the land, at 
this particular period. Nothing but the purpose and the 
power of the Creator can offer any explanation of them. 
So both Agassiz and Hugh Miller viewed them. And 
in them we cannot but see and recognize the exercise of 
a ceaseless and all-embracing Providence. 

(7.) The earth having been thus fitted and furnished, 
we presently again witness the most wonderful and the 
most convincing evidence of the immediate presence and 
direct agency of God in the creation of Man himself — 
a being immeasurably above all that preceded him — a 



94 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

being possessing an immortal spirit, and endowed with 
a reasoning mind and a directing conscience, capable of 
knowing, loving, and serving his Glorious Creator. 

Such are a few examples of the Facts which offer 
incontestable proof, that throughout the whole vast 
period of the earth's geological history, God exercised a 
ceaseless and all-controlling Providence over all the 
progressive changes of the globe — that His hand and 
counsel were concerned in every arrangement and every 
product that contributed toward its completion as a 
habitation for man. And if so, what ground or reason 
can there be to suppose, that He has discontinued or 
suspended that Providence in the present far more 
interesting and important period of its history ? When 
God had finished this beautiful world, whose formation 
and furniture occupied his mind and hands for so many 
ages, is it credible that He then at once cast it aside, as 
a thing neglected, and no longer worthy his care or 
attention? That were a most unworthy and derogatory 
notion indeed — that were to sink the All-wise Being 
beneath the conduct of a rational creature. Nay — now 
that the earth is freighted with both the temporal and 
immortal interests of all humanity, for whom the world 
was made, have we not infinitely greater reasons to 
believe in a providence that is unslumbering and un- 
remitting in its care over all ? 

A world without Divine Providence ! what would it 
be? to what would it come? When we contemplate 
the multiplicity of elements and agencies that are in the 
world ; the diversity of potent Forces that perpetually 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 95 

combine, or cross, or oppose one another ; all of which 
must be kept in their due and fitting exercise without 
fail or cessation, in order to ensure the safety and to 
meet the wants of its countless living tenants — and when 
we further consider that, as a defect in one tooth of the 
smallest wheel of a chronometer will derange the motion 
of all its other parts, so a failure or error in the working 
of one force or one element in the complicated machin- 
ery of the world might propagate derangement and de- 
struction to its utmost bounds — one trembles at the very 
thought of the Almighty suspending or withdrawing for 
an hour his providential care and rule over it. 

How numerous and varied are the relations and ad- 
justments of inorganic elements to the functions of life ! 
How delicate are these relations, and yet how tremen- 
dous are the issues depending upon their right and 
infallible management ! This will be readily perceived 
from a few facts. The same elements combined in one 
proportion are sometimes nutritious food, or grateful 
stimulant, soothing and sustaining the powers of life ; 
whilst in another proportion, they may be a deadly 
poison, paralyzing the hecrt, and carrying agony along 
every fibre and nerve of the body. Take Tea and Strych- 
nia — the active principle of these two substances, Theine 
and Strychnine, are identical, so far as their elements 
are concerned, and differ from each other only in the 
proportions in which they are combined. Take again 
Sugar and Oxalic Acid — the first is a pleasant condi- 
ment, the second a destructive poison; yet they are 
composed of the very same elements, and sugar may 



96 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

readily be converted into this deadly acid. Again, let hy- 
drogen gas, which forms so large a proportion of the water 
we drink, become mixed with chlorine, and the moment 
the influence of Light falls upon them, they unite with 
explosive violence. Again, if nitrogen gas, which con- 
stitutes four-fifths of the atmosphere we hourly breathe, 
be mixed with hydrogen, it forms the pungent Ammo- 
nia ; with carbon, and it gives the poisonous Cyanogen, 
which forms the base of Prussic Acid ; with chlorine, and 
it yields a fluid, which when touched by an unctuous 
body explodes more violently than any other known sub- 
stance ; and combined with other materials, it produces 
fulminating compounds of the most dangerous character. 
What misery, what havoc, then, in this world, now so 
full of life and happiness, if such elements as these were 
left to combine and act by chance or accident ! 

Once more : Let us devote a moment to contemplate 
the constitution of the air we inhale. This is composed 
of one part of oxygen to four parts of nitrogen ; and 
upon the maintenance of this exact proportion of these 
gases depends the life of every creature that breathes. 
Let this proportion be changed but a trifle one way or 
another, or let the relative weights of the two gases be 
but slightly varied, and we have an atmosphere of death. 
The composition of the atmosphere cannot be changed 
in one particular, or in any degree, without fatal results 
to all animals, and even to all plants. But what vast 
and varied agencies there are in constant activity, all 
of which are calculated to derange and corrupt the whole 
constitution of the air round about us — the immense and 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 97 

ceaseless exhalations from sea and land, from pestilential 
marshes, from thousands of crowded cities, and millions 
of rotting carcases; the hot and sulphurous fumes of 
four hundred active volcanoes that are day and night 
breathed into it; the blaze and rush of lightning that 
rift and agitate it; the smoke and steam that arise from 
the hearthstones of all human habitations ; the corrupted 
breaths of our whole race and of all the brute creation — 
if all these were left to blind chance, left to accumulate 
and flood thick and heavy at random over the face of 
the earth, then the glory of this terrestrial abode had 
departed, all life had been extinguished, and all beauty 
faded out of existence. Ichabod might be inscribed on 
all the scenes that now delight our eyes and gladden our 
hearts ! — What, then, less than everpresent and almighty 
Power can perpetually watch over and carry all these 
through new and renovating combinations, and thus 
maintain the constitution of the atmosphere in its in- 
tegrity and purity, through every season of the year 
and over every region of the globe ? 

To all the above, we may add another fact of interest, 
bearing directly on the point before us. The atmosphere 
is pervaded by an element called Azone, which, as the 
recent experiments of Schonbein have proved, is devel- 
oped by the processes of combustion, respiration, and par- 
ticularly electrical discharges. This is an active agent 
in removing from the atmosphere organic poisons, to 
which many forms of pestilence are traceable. The 
prevalency of Azone, unlike oxygen and nitrogen, is varia- 
ble ; and it is a most interesting fact, that a deficiency 
7 



98 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

of atmospheric Azone marks the prevalencj of Cholera, 
and an excess distinguishes the reign of Influenza. Here, 
then, is another element, which, left to its own guidance, 
might now oscillate to one extreme, and generate a class 
of diseases that might in a single season decimate the 
human family ; and then, like the pendulum, swing to 
'the opposite extreme, and bring on other pestilential 
scourges that would again fill the habitations of the 
residue with lamentation and mourning and woe.* 
A world 'without Divine Providence! what would it he? 
to what would it come ? 

"There are certain philosophers," says President 
McCosh, " who are ever talking of the Laws of Nature, 
as if they could accomplish all that we see in the earth 
and heavens, without the necessity of calling in any 
Divine skill to arrange them. We have sometimes 
thought that it might be an appropriate punishment to 
deal with such persons as Jupiter did with those who 
complained to him of the way in which he regulated the 
weather. We would give the philosophers referred to 
a world of their own. with all the substances of nature, 
and their properties labeled upon them, and arranged 
according to human science, much like the articles in 
a museum, or an apothecary's shop. We would place 
the Mineralogist over the metals, and the Anatomist 
over the animals, and the Botanist over the vegetable 
substances; we would give the Meteorologist charge of 

* For many other interesting and instructive particulars connected 
with the composition of the atmosphere, the reader is referred to a 
work of the author, entitled Science and the Bible, pp. 101-107. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. <)y 

the atmosphere and rain, and we would furnish the 
Astronomer with those nebulse, out of which it is sup- 
posed that the stars are formed as webs are formed out 
of fleeces of wool. Having called these philosophers 
together in cabinet council, we would there commit to 
them these principia of worlds. Taking care to retire 
to a respectful distance for safety, it might be curious to 
listen to their disputes with one another; and then, 
when they had arranged their plans of operation, to find 
the Chemist blown up by his own gases, and the Min- 
eralogist sinking in the excavations which he had made, 
and the Anatomist groaning under disease, and the 
Botanist pining for hunger, and the Weather Regulator 
deluged with his own rain, and the Astronomer driven 
ten thousand leagues into space by the recalcitration of 
some refractory planet. We may be sure that these 
philosophers would be the first to beg of Him who is the 
Disposer as well as the Creator of all things, to resume 
the government of his own world." * 

Well may Dr. Carpenter charge this class of men with 
arrogance. The assertion that, because what are called 
the Laws of Nature are fixed to us, the Divine Father 
cannot exercise through those Laws a special providence 
toward his children, can proceed only from a presump- 
tuous imagination of the most unworthy kind. What 
qualification can the wisest among men claim to pro- 
nounce a decision so positive in reference to the conduct 
of the Infinite and Mysterious Being ? To compare great 



* The Method of the Divine Government, p. 110. 



100 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

things with small — A Grammarian may be acquainted 
with the sounds of all the letters and the meaning of all 
the words in a language ; but would this qualify or enable 
him to state confidently all the possible ideas and all the 
shades of meaning that a master-mind might set forth 
with those letters and words ? Any pretence to do such 
a thing we should put down as simply foolish. Equally 
absurd is it for men, from their elementary and imperfect 
knowledge of the properties or forces of matter, to assert 
that under the all-comprehending control of the Almighty 
they may not be combined and directed to minister spe- 
cifically to the wants and welfare of every human being. 
Nay, more absurd is it — for the foremost naturalists of 
the day have not yet mastered even the alphabet of the 
vast and complicated system of nature. Who among 
them all can tell us, What is Light ? What is Matter ? 
What is Magnetism ? What is Gravitation ? What is 
Heat ? What is Life ? What and how many are the 
Original Elements of matter? What is that Affinity 
which holds them in combination ? What is the Dura- 
tion of our globe ? When and how was it moulded ? 
To what physical destiny does it tend ? Who can answer 
these questions? Who will pretend to answer them? 
On not one of these questions are the views of scientific 
men settled. The same holds true of numerous other 
subjects. 

What humbling confessions have efforts ever baffled 
wrung from the keenest and most vigorous intellects of 
living physicists ! Here is Herbert Spencers — "After 
no matter how great a progress in the colligation of facts, 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 1Q1 

and the establishment of generalizations ever wider and 
wider — after the merging of limited and derivative truths, 
in truths that are larger and deeper, has been carried no 
matter how far ; the fundamental truth remains as much 
beyond reach as ever. The explanation of that which 
is explicable, does but bring out into greater clearness 
the inexplicableness of that which remains behind. 
Alike in the external and the internal worlds, the man 
of science sees himself in the midst of perpetual changes 
of which he can discover neither the beginning nor the 
end. ... In all directions his investigations eventually 
bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and 
he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble 
enigma." * 

" To assume," says Lyell, " that the evidence of the 
beginning or end of so vast a scheme lies within the 
reach of our philosophical inquiries, or even of our specu- 
lations, appears to be inconsistent with a just estimate 
of the relations which subsist between the finite powers 
of man and the attributes of an Infinite and Eternal 
Being." f 

Prof. Tyndall is compelled to use similar language : 
" If you ask me," says he, " whether science has solved, 
or is likely to solve, the problem of this universe, I must 
shake my head in doubt. We have been talking of 
matter and force ; but whence came matter, and whence 
came force ? Who made all these starry orbs ? Science 
makes no attempt to answer. As far as I can see, there 

* First Principles, I., 3, \ 21. 

t Principles of Geology, Vol. II., p. 613, tenth edition. 



102 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

is no quality in the human intellect which is fit to be 
applied to the solution of the problem. The phenomena 
of matter and force lie within our intellectual range, 
and as far as they reach we will at all hazards push our 
inquiries. But behind, and above, and around all, the 
real mysteries of this universe remain unsolved; and 
here the true philosopher will bow his head in humility, 
and admit that all he can do in this direction is no more 
than what is within the compass of an ordinary child." * 
We see, then,, that the bold and undevout denial of 
Divine Providence, made by certain men of science, is 
stamped, by their own confession of ignorance, as pre- 
sumptuous and arrogant in the highest degree. What- 
ever authority their names may carry with them in 
scientific circles, they weigh not a feather against this 
sublime doctrine of the Gospel ; nor should their learned 
and imposing vocabulary move any for a moment to the 
disuse of the terms and similitudes in which it is therein 
set forth — terms and similitudes simple yet beautifully 
true. Nothing that Natural Science has yet brought to 
light demands the slightest modification of one expres- 
sion employed by the Saviour to teach us the watchful 
care of our Father in heaven over us. His utterances 
were not notions, not theories, not opinions — but Truths. 
And it is with satisfaction unspeakable that we now 
return to the feet of this meek and wise and holy 
Teacher sent from God, to whose mind the Laws and 
Forces of nature, in all their endless intricacy of action 



* Lecture to Working Men, at Dundee, 1S67. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 103 

and reaction were clearly seen and fully understood at 
each passing moment. And it is with feelings of joy 
and devotion that we take our place among the multi- 
tude that He is leading- abroad into the open fields of 
nature, where, on touching their eyes, He surprises them 
with the sight of the Hand, which upholds the universe, 
employed in painting- the lily of the field, feeding the 
fowls of the air, and adjusting and succoring the descent 
of the falling sparrow ! Never man spake as the man 
Christ Jesus. 

"What life and beauty, when, in all that breathes, 
Or moves, or grows,. His Hand is viewed at work ! 
When it is viewed unfolding every bud, 
Each blossom tinging, shapiug every leaf, 
Wafting each cloud that passes o'er the sky, 
Kolling each billow, moving every wing 
That fans the air, and every warbling throat 
Heard in the tuneful woodlands ! "—Wilcox. 

III. Laws of Nature — Their Bearing on Answer 
to Prayer. 

No duty, no religious exercise, occupies a larger or 
more prominent place in the Christian system than 
Prayer. The New Testament Scriptures throughout 
abound with precepts, examples, forms, promises, and 
encouragements in regard to the obligation and benefit 
of thus devoutly addressing the Father of Mercies. 
Indeed this Sacred Volume may be regarded as the 
"Common Prayer Book" of the human family. It 
teaches us both how to pray and what to pray for ; and 
assures us in the most express terms and emphatic 



104 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

manner of the efficacy of prayer, as means of obtaining 
from God blessings both temporal and spiritual. The 
broad command and unqualified promise given are, "Ask, 
and ye shall receive ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, 
and it shall be opened unto you." 

To engage and establish men in the exercise of prayer, 
our blessed Lord delivered the several parables of The 
Widow and the Unjust Judge, of The Pharisee and the 
Publican in the Temple, and of The Friend coming to a 
Friend at midnight. And to convince us of God's loving 
readiness to hear and answer the prayers of his earthly 
offspring, He appeals to, and reasons from the tenderest 
and strongest affection of the human heart — parental 
Love. " If a son ask bread of any of you that is a father, 
will he give him a stone ? or, if he ask a fish, will he 
for a fish give him a serpent ? or, if he shall ask an egg, 
will he offer him a scorpion ? If ye, then, being evil, 
know how to give good gifts unto your children, how 
much more shall your heavenly Father give good things 
to them that ask Him?" And in harmony with all this 
it is added that, " Men ought always to pray and not to 
faint," seeing " the same Lord over all is rich unto all 
that call upon Him." 

Thus plainly do the New Testament Scriptures teach 
us the duty and benefit of Prayer — that by means of it 
a process of real and actual interchange between every 
soul of man on earth and God in heaven may be estab- 
lished, a process of ascending petitions on the one side 
and of descending mercies in answer to them on the other. 
In short, the Gospel enjoins and fosters the belief, that 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 105 

by prayer, believing prayer, we may grasp the hand of 
Omnipotence, and hang on the neck of Infinite Love, in 
full assurance that, whatever we ask according to his 
will, shall be given us. 

Prayer for Food, Protection, and Success. 

Plain and positive as the above teachings are, and 
coming to us with the authority of the Divine Master 
as they do, yet there are not wanting in these days men 
bold enough to cast their own individual authority into 
the scales against His, and to question and qualify and 
limit the statements which He has made, and to tell us 
that so far as " any material or physical benefits," at 
least, are concerned, prayer has no such power with God, 
and results in no such advantages to man. They scruple 
not to assert, that human supplications, however earnest 
or persevering, can have no influence in the "visible 
universe," can procure no "material benefit," can ward 
off no " physical danger " — in brief, can in nowise change 
or affect man's earthly lot. Prayers offered to be saved 
from the ravages of disease or famine, or to be favored 
with food, health and security they smile at, as none 
other than the effusions of ignorance and superstition. 

In order to show both plainly and fairly the position 
taken by these sceptics, we quote a few sentences from 
one that is regarded a leader among them. Professor 
John Tyndall, speaking of the ancient devout custom 
observed among the Tyrolese, of offering annually a 
special prayer for favorable weather and a fruitful sea- 
son, says, " Year by year the Highest was entreated by 



106 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

official intercessors, to make such meteorological arrange- 
ments as should insure food and shelter for their flocks 
and herds. ... In this the Priest did not deem that he 
asked the Creator to perform a miracle, but to do some- 
thing which he manifestly thought lay quite within the 
bounds of the natural and non-miraculous. ... But 
Law teaches us that the Italian wind gliding over the 
crest of the Matterhorn is as firmly ruled as the earth 
in its orbital revolution round the sun; and that the 
fall of its vapor into clouds is exactly as much a matter 
of necessity as the return of the seasons. The disper- 
sion, therefore, of the slightest mist by the special volition 
of the Eternal, would be as much a miracle as the rolling 
of the Ehone over the Grimsel precipices and down Has- 
lithal to Brientz. . . . Science asserts that without a 
disturbance of natural Law quite as serious as the stop- 
page of an eclipse, or the rolling of the St. Lawrence up 
the Falls of Niagara, no act of humiliation, individual or 
national, could call one shower from heaven, or deflect 
toward us a single beam of the sun."* 

These assuredly are bold assertions, and that, what- 
ever else may distinguish their author, reveal a mind in 
this instance at least, far enough from the modesty of 
true science and from the humility which usually char- 
acterizes real greatness. Here, instead of a Newton com- 
paring himself to " a little child gathering a few pebbles 
on the shore, while the vast ocean of truth lay un- 
explored before him," we have an individual speaking 



* Fragments of Science, pp. 38-40. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 107 

apparently with the confidence and authority of one 
who had been admitted into the Penetralia of the upper 
sanctuary, and to whose mind the whole agency of God 
together with all the mysteries of the universe were 
familiarly present. Here is a man heroic enough to set 
a limit to the operations of the Infinite, and to pronounce 
the clear developments of his word inconsistent with 
those of his works. The undevout assurance, not to 
say arrogance, underlying such assertions, forcibly re- 
minds us of the familiar lines — 

"As, if upon a full-proportioned dome, 
On swelling columns heaved, the pride of art ! 
A critic fly, whose feeble ray scarce spreads 
An inch around, with blind presumption bold, 
Should dare to tax the structure of the whole." 

Most deliberately, because most safely, we may say, 
that there is not a man living, whose knowledge of the 
complicated and mysterious operations carried on in the 
vast laboratory of Nature is so complete, or whose under- 
standing of God's connection with those operations is so 
clear and certain, as to warrant or justify him in the 
naked assertion, that the Almighty God, who upholdeth 
all things by the word of his power, and by whom all 
things consist, cannot answer the prayer of faith for 
timely rain, or fruitful seasons, without disturbance of 
the established laws of nature. Man cannot think be- 
yond what God can do. 

On what ground does Mr. Tyndall hold prayer for 
material blessings to be a delusion, and an answer to 
such prayer a thing incredible? Is it on account of 



108 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

some inherent unreasonableness in the act of prayer ? or 
because supplication to the Most High is inconsistent 
with some self-evident truths or fundamental principles? 
No ; he has no such ground on which to base his objec- 
tion ; on the contrary, he is constrained to make this 
admission — " The theory," says he, " that the system of 
nature is under the control of a Being who changes phe- 
nomena in compliance with the prayers of men, is, in 
my opinion, a perfectly legitimate one. It may of course 
be rendered futile by being associated with conceptions 
which contradict it, but such conceptions form no neces- 
sary part of the theory. It is a matter of experience 
that an earthly father, who is at the same time both 
wise and tender, listens to the requests of his children, 
and, if they do not ask amiss, takes pleasure in granting 
their requests. We know also that this compliance 
extends to the alteration, within certain limits, of the 
current of events on earth. With this suggestion offered 
by our experience, it is no departure from scientific 
method to place behind natural phenomena a universal 
Father, who, in answer to the prayers of his children, 
alters the currents of those phenomena. Thus far The- 
ology and Science go hand in hand. The conception 
of an ether, for example, trembling with the waves of 
light, is suggested by the ordinary phenomena of wave- 
mot'on in water and in air ; and in like manner the con- 
ception of personal volition in nature is suggested by 
the ordinary action of man upon earth. I therefore urge 
no impossibilities; I do not even urge inconsistency; 
but, on the contrary, frankly admit that you have as 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 109 

good a right to place your conception at the root of phe- 
nomena as I have to place mine. But without verifica- 
tion a theoretic conception is a mere figment of the 
intellect, and I am sorry to find us parting company at 
this point. The region of theory, both in science and the- 
ology, lies behind the world of the senses, but the verifi- 
cation of theory occurs in the sensible world. To check 
the theory we have simply to compare the deductions 
from it with the facts of observation. If the deductions 
be in accordance with the facts, we accept the theory : 
if in opposition, the theory is given up."* 

Professor Tyndall's position then is plain : he denies 
the efficacy of prayers for any material or physical favors 
simply on the ground that he has no sensible evidence 
or verification that they are answered ; and the evidence 
or verification which he looks for and demands is, to use 
his own words, " the disturbance of natural Law." But 
as no such disturbance is ever observed to take place, he 
concludes that no such prayer is ever answered. With 
this scientist the authority of the Holy Scriptures in the 
case is nothing. The testimony of inspired Prophets, 
though confirmed by the most signal fulfilment of their 
predictions, is altogether ignored. And the teachings of 
Jesus Christ himself, whose Divine Commission is estab- 
lished by evidences varied, numerous, and most conclu- 
sive, are allowed no weight, no place, in the settlement 
of this point. And it is nothing to him that good men 
in all ages and of all countries — many of them in acute- 



* Contemporary Beview, October, 1872, p. 764. 



110 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

ness and vigor of intellect not a whit inferior to himself 
— testify as with one voice from their personal experience 
that God does hear and answer prayers for such blessings. 
He must have his own chosen evidence, and none other. 
Like one of old, he has selected his test, and except he 
shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put 
his finger into the print of the nails, and thrust his 
hand into his side, he will not believe. By "disturbance 
of natural Law " only, in his estimation, can such prayers 
be answered, and such disturbance he must witness, or 
he will not believe. 

Such is the position taken by Mr. Tyndall and others. 
The bearing of these materialistic views, not on prayer 
only, but also on Divine Providence, and indeed on the 
whole system of the Christian Religion, is sufficiently 
evident : if these views are true and correct, then the 
teachings of Christ and his Apostles cannot be so ; the 
doctrines they have delivered us are vain, and our hopes 
and devotions founded on them are vain also. Hence- 
forth our worship, as another master of this school inti- 
mates, must be "for the most part of the silent sort, at 
the altar of the unknown and unknowable" * We are 
happy in the belief, however, that no developments that 
have yet been made by these or any other scientists 
force us to accept such views or to occupy so cheerless 
a position. " They worship they know not what : we 
know whom we worship." 

When we pray for such material or physical blessings 

* Huxley's Lay Sermons, p. 16. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. \\\ 

as we need, we do not admit — facts do not require us to 
admit — as the scientific sceptic would have us, that we 
ask God to perform miracles ; and if God hear, and see 
fit to grant such requests, we do not believe that He 
must necessarily disturb the order of Nature to do so. 
If with an humble and believing heart we offer the 
petition taught us by the Great Teacher, Give us this day 
our daily bread ; * or with the Apostle James offer the 
prayer of faith for the healing of the sick ; f or with St. 
Paul make request for a safe journey ; J or with the Church 
of Corinth ask to be prospered in business ; || or with the 
Christians of Jerusalem pray for deliverance from the 
invasion and assaults of armies; § or with the Philippians 
look on high for the supply of all our need *\\ — we believe 
that God can grant any or all of these favors, and that 
without the violation or disturbance of any Law of 
Nature. 

In the preceding chapter we have seen that every 
change or production observed in Nature is the result, 
not of any one particular Law or Force, but of a number 
of Forces suitably balanced in regard to one another — 
that while every Law or Force is, in its own nature and 
operation, fixed and invariable, it produces the same 
effect only when it works under the same conditions in 
reference to other Laws or Forces — that as these con- 
ditions are susceptible of endless variation, results may 
be endlessly varied without the violation or suspension 
of the operation of a single Law or Force ; and from the 



*Matt. vi. 11. f James v. 15. JRom. i. 10. 

!| 1 Cor. xvi. 2. I Luke xxi. 3G. ^ Phil. iv. 19. 



112 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

series of examples there adduced of the variable results 
actually effected in sea and land and air, in soil and 
climate and production, by the action of invariable and 
inflexible Laws, we can readily understand how God, in 
answer to prayer, can grant any material blessing or 
physical benefit without the slightest disturbance of any 
natural Law* By simple adjustment or balancing of 
the Forces of Nature, the Great Ruler of all, when his 
people cry, can send or withhold rain, can restore health 
or ward off disease, can grant favoring winds to the 
mariner or fruitful seasons to the husbandman, without 
disturbing in the slightest degree the established order 
of Nature. All Force, all Energy, in operation in the 
universe, being none other than the Force or Energy 
of His own omnipotent Will, manifesting itself under 
different phases, He can interpose among physical agents 
for their mutual adjustment beyond the reach of mans 
vision or sagacity ; can determine their balancings ivhere 
human science cannot trace, nor human instruments detect 
the influence of his power — where all the workings of Laics 
known to man are lost and vanish in the Divine Volition, 
whence all Laics and all Forces are derived. In this way 
God may answer the prayers of his children without the 
intervention of what we call a miracle, and in perfect 
harmony with all the known and unknown laws of 
creation. 

Here is an humble and believing suppliant — an event 



* The reader is requested to turn back, and review pages 106-109, and 
consider the several facts there set forth in their bearing on Answer 
to Prayer. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 113 

takes place, according to the usual course of Nature, 
that brings to him the very favor for which he had made 
request; now we affirm that it does not lie within the 
power or reach of human science, as sceptics assume, to 
determine whether the Divine Volition was or was not 
directly concerned in such an event, and that, for the 
simple reason that man cannot trace back the chain of 
antecedents and consequents concerned in bringing it 
about, but a very few links only; the profoundest scientist, 
after he has taken less than half a dozen steps in this 
direction, finds himself out of his depth. He witnesses 
an event A, transpiring before him ; Z 9 we will say, is 
its ultimate cause : he may be able to discern that A was 
produced by B, and that B in some way resulted from 
the influence of C 9 and that D in connection with un- 
known agents had something to do in the bringing about 
of C ; here he is brought to a stand, while all the long 
series of agencies and connections beyond running up 
to Z are to him altogether unsearchable. " Observation," 
says a late writer, himself a distinguished philosopher — 
" observation may conduct us a certain length backwards 
in the train of causes and effects ; but, after having done 
its uttermost, we feel, that, above and beyond its loftiest 
place of ascent, there are still higher steps in the train 
which we vainly try to reach, and find them inaccessible. 

"It is even so throughout all philosophy. After hav- 
ing arrived at the remotest cause which man can reach 
his way to, we shall ever find there are higher and 
remoter causes still, which distance all his powers of 
research, and so will ever remain in deepest concealment 

8 



114 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

from his view. Of this higher part of the train he has 
no observation. Of these remoter causes, and their mode 
of succession, he can positively say nothing. For aught 
he knows, they may be under the immediate control of 
higher beings in the universe ; or, like the upper part 
of a chain, a few of whose closing links are all that is 
visible to us, they may be directly appended to the 
throne, and at all times subject to the instant pleasure 
of a prayer-hearing God. And it may be by a responsive 
touch at the higher, and not the lower part of the pro- 
gression, that He answers our prayers. It maybe not 
by an act of intervention among those near and visible 
causes, where intervention would be a miracle ; it may 
be by an unseen, but not less effectual act of interven- 
tion, among the remote and therefore the occult causes, 
that He adapts Himself to the various wants, and meets 
the various petitions of His children. If it be in the 
latter way that He conducts the affairs of His daily gov- 
ernment — then may He rule by a providence as special, 
as are the needs and the occasions of His family ; and, 
with an ear open to every cry, might He provide for all, 
and administer to all, without one infringement on the 
uniformity of visible nature. 

" It is not by a visible movement within the region of 
human observation, but by an invisible movement in the 
transcendental region above it, that the prayer is met 
and responded to. The Supernal Power of the Universe, 
the mighty and unseen Being who sits aloft, and has 
been significantly styled the Cause of causes — He, in 
immediate contact with the upper extremities of every 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. \\§ 

progression, there puts forth an over-ruling influence, 
which tells and propagates downwards to the lower 
extremities; and so, by an agency placed too remote 
either for the eye of sense or for all the instruments of 
science to discover, may God, in answer if He choose to 
prayer, fix and determine every series of events — of 
which nevertheless all that man can see is but the uni- 
formity of the closing footsteps— a few of the last causes 
and effects following each other in their wonted order. 
It is thus that we reconcile all the experience which 
man has of nature's uniformity, with the effect and 
significancy of his prayers to the God of nature. It is 
thus that at one and the same time, do we live under 
the care of a presiding God, and among the regularities 
of a harmonious universe. 

" God hath in wisdom ordained a regimen of general 
laws ; and, that man might gather from the memory of 
the past, those lessons of observation which serve for the 
guidance of the future, He hath enacted that all those suc- 
cessions shall be invariable, which have their place and 
fulfilment within the world of sensible experience. Yet 
God has not, on that account, made the world independ- 
ent of Himself. He keeps a perpetual hold on all its 
events and processes notwithstanding. He does not dis- 
sever Himself, for a single instant, from the government 
and the guardianship of His own universe ; and can still, 
notwithstanding all we see of nature's rigid uniformity, 
adapt the forthgoings of His power to all the wants and 
all the prayers of His dependent family. For this pur- 
pose, He does not need to stretch forth His hand on the 



116 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

inferior and visible links of any progression, so as to 
shift the known successions of experience ; or at all to 
intermeddle with the lessons and the laws of this great 
schoolmaster. He may work in secret, and yet perform 
all His pleasure — not by the achievement of a miracle 
on nature's open platform ; but by the touch of one or 
other of those master springs, which lie within the 
recesses of her inner laboratory. There, and at His 
place of supernal command by the fountain heads of 
influence, He can turn whithersoever He will the ma- 
chinery of our world, and without the possibility of 
human eye detecting the least infringement on any of 
its processes — at once upholding the regularity of visi- 
ble nature, and the supremacy of nature's invisible God."* 
In the physical world the connection between a par- 
ticular cause and its immediate effect, in general, may 
be clearly traced and established ; but in the providen- 
tial and spiritual worlds, from the nature of things, this 
is not so easily done. The connection between prayer 
and its answer, not being visible or tangible, Ave may 
not be able to trace and prove it to the satisfaction of 
the sceptic, while at the same time it may be as real, 
and to the believing soul as certain, as that between 
the attracting moon and the heaving tide. It will be 
in place here, therefore, by way of illustration to intro- 
duce a few instances of providential occurrences, in 
which pious minds have ever recognized the hand of 
God working out his answer to the prayer of faith. 



*Dr. T. Chalmers' Works, Vol. VII., p. 234, etc. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. H7 

As upon the safety of the acorn sprout depends the 
growth and strength and value of the future oak, so 
upon the early safety of the little Plymouth Colony 
depended the springing up of the great Tree of American 
Liberty ; and, we may say, the existence of the vast and 
happy nation which spans this continent to-day. And we 
may reasonably suppose that if the great God interests 
Himself in any of the affairs of this world, He has been 
interested in the formation, character, and destiny of 
such a nation as this. Now in an early day, the spring 
of 1623, our Pilgrim Fathers, finding that supplies from 
the old country could no longer be depended upon, set 
themselves to plant more corn than they had ever done 
before; but by the time they had done planting, their 
stock of food was spent. They daily prayed, " Give us 
this day our daily bread," and in one way or another 
their wants continued to be supplied. In the month of 
June, their hopes of a harvest were nearly blasted by 
a drought, which withered up the corn, and made the 
grass look like hay. All expected to perish with hunger. 
In their distress, these godly people set apart a day for 
humiliation and prayer, and continued their worship 
for eight or nine hours. "God," says the historian, 
"heard their prayers, and answered them in a way 
which excited universal admiration." Although the 
morning of that day was clear, and the weather very 
hot and dry during the whole forenoon, yet presently 
clouds were seen to form and extend in every direc- 
tion, and before night it began to rain, and refreshing 
showers continued to fall for many days, so that the 



118 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

ground became thoroughly soaked, and the drooping 
corn revived. 

At a later date in our history, 1746, the French fitted 
out a powerful armament for the destruction of New 
England. This fleet consisted of forty ships of war, and 
to all human judgment seemed a sufficient force to render 
that destruction certain. It was put under the command 
of the resolute and experienced Duke d'Anville, and set 
sail on its terrible errand from Chebucto in Nova Scotia. 
In the meantime, our pious forefathers, apprised of their 
danger, and feeling that their only safety was in God, 
appointed a season of fasting and prayer to be observed 
in all their churches. While the Eev. Mr. Prince was 
officiating in " Old South Church," on this fast-day, and 
praying most fervently to God, to avert the dreaded 
calamity, the wind suddenly rose (the day had till now 
been perfectly clear and calm), and became so powerful 
as to rattle violently all the windows in the building. 
The man of God, startled, for a moment paused in this 
prayer, and cast a look round upon the congregation ; 
he then resumed his supplication, and besought Almighty 
God to cause that wind to frustrate the object of their 
enemies, and save the country from conquest and Popery. 
The wind increased into a tempest, and that very night 
the greater part of the French fleet was wrecked on the 
coast of Nova Scotia. The Duke d'Anville, the principal 
General, and tne second in command, both committed 
suicide. Many died with disease, and thousands were 
consigned to a watery grave. The small number that 
remained alive returned to France, without health and 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. \\§ 

without spirits. And the enterprise was abandoned, and 
never again resumed. 

The learned and philosophical Dr. Dwight, President 
of Yale College, referring to the foregoing and similar 
events in the early history of this country, says : " I am 
bound, as an inhabitant of New England, solemnly to 
declare, that, were there no other instances to be found 
in any other country, the blessings communicated to 
this would furnish ample satisfaction that God answers 
prayer, to every sober, much more to every pious man. 
Among these, the destruction of the French armament 
under the Duke d'Anville ought to be remembered with 
gratitude, and admiration, by every inhabitant of this 
country. Impious men, who regard not the work of the 
Lord, nor the operation of his hands, may refuse to give 
God the glory of his most merciful interposition. But 
our Ancestors had, and it is to be hoped their descend- 
aits ever will have, both piety and good sense, sufficient 
to ascribe to Jehovah the greatness and the power, and the 
victory and the majesty ; and to bless the Lord God of 
Isiael for ever and ever" * 

The eventful history of the Scotch Covenanters pre- 
sent many striking instances of what we believe were 
direct answers to prayers. Alexander Peden, with some 
others, having been pursued for a long distance, on 
ascending a hill, found themselves so exhausted that 
they could go no farther, when Peden said, "Let us 
prap here, for if the Lord doth not save us, we are all 

* System of Theology, Yol. IV., p. 127. 



120 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

dead men." He then fell upon his knees and prayed, 
saying-. " Lord, this is the hour and power of thine 
enemies : send them alter those to whom thou hast riven 
strength to flee, for our strength is gone. Twine them 
about the hill. Lord, and cast the lap of thy cloak 
over thy poor servants, and save us at this time, and 
we will keep it in remembrance, and tell to the com- 
mendation of thy goodness, thy pity and compassion, 
what thou didst for us at such a time." And in this he 
was heard, says the historian, for a cloud of mist imme- 
diately intervened between them and their persecutors ; 
and ere it cleared away the pursuers received orders 
from head-quarters to go in pursuit of others. 

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, England reached 8 
crisis, the most momentous doubtless in the history o r 
that country. Eoman Catholic Europe and Reformel 
Europe were struggling for death or life. The Engliii 
Government was at the head of the Protestant interes: ; 
at the head of the opposite party was the mightiest 
prince of the age. a prince who ruled over Spain. Por- 
tugal. Italy, the Netherlands, the East and West Indits, 
of whom the leading powers of the day stood in respect- 
ful awe. This prince. Philip II. of Spain, a morose aid 
cruel bigot, urged and supported by the Pope of Bone, 
determined upon the invasion and conquest of Englaid, 
and devoted the wealth of the Indies to the buildingof 
ships, raising armies and purchasing stores for that pur- 
pose. While all this was going on. England was lot 
idle, but made all possible preparation to meet and repel 
the Invader. The Protestants of all Europe regaried 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 121 

with intense interest the approaching contest, which 
would decide, not only the liberties and religion of Eng- 
land, but the fate of their own religion also. Prayers, 
therefore, from the first, were offered to God without 
ceasing in the churches and families and closets of the 
Protestants for the safety of England and the defeat of 
the enemy. " The Puritans, even in the depths of the 
prisons to which the Queen had sent them, prayed, and 
with no simulated fervor, that she might be kept from 
the danger of the assassin, that rebellion might be put 
down under her feet, and that her arms might be victo- 
rious by sea and land." * And these fervent prayers, as 
the issue proved, were not offered in vain. At length, 
the fleet of Philip, The Invincible Armada, as it was 
proudly styled, sailed forth from the Tagus. It pro- 
ceeded up the English Channel in the form of a crescent, 
of which the horns were seven miles asunder. The 
motion of this fleet, the greatest that had ever ploughed 
the ocean, was slow though every sail was spread ; " the 
winds," says Camden, the chronicler of the times, " being 
as it were tired with carrying them, and the ocean groan- 
ing under their weight." It was a force indeed that might 
well have struck terror into the heart of any people ; 
but the English had committed their cause to God. And 
behold now the result — not an individual of the mighty 
armament was permitted to set foot on British soil. 
Foiled plans, daring assaults, and destructive storms 
overtook them in quick succession ; and disaster followed 



* Macaulay's History of England, Vol. I., p. 48. 



122 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

disaster, until there remained of this vast and vaunting 
force but an insignificant and shattered remnant to 
return to Spain to tell the tale. So complete was the 
defeat on the one side, and so happy was the deliverance 
on the other, that the result was marvellous alike in the 
eyes of friends and foes. They cried unto the Lord in 
their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses. 
Whatever the sceptics of this day, standing in safety 
and at a distance, may say to this, all those engaged in 
the fearful struggle devoutly acknowledged the Hand of 
God in the issue — and significant and impressive are the 
memorable words in which they did so — 

The people — Invincible to man, but destroyed by the Lord. 

The Queen — God breathed, and they were dispersed. 

King Philip — / bow to the decrees of Heaven. 

Exactly one hundred years after the above event, the 
liberties and religion of England were again in jeopardy, 
when King James II. covertly attempted the subversion 
of the Government and the re-establishment of Catholi- 
cism. Discovering his aims, and that he was about to 
carry them, great was the consternation of the Protes- 
tants. Conscious of the King's power, and of their own 
danger, " divers lords spiritual and temporal " united in 
a request to Prince William of Orange to come over from 
Holland to help them. This prince, thoroughly in sym- 
pathy with their cause, acceded and at once set himself 
to raise an army, and collect a fleet for their transporta- 
tion. At length the time set for embarkation arrived ; 
but the wind continued contrary. A solemn fast was 
observed, and public prayers to Heaven were offered for 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 123 

the safety and success of an expedition that went forth 
to secure ends so important. The " Protestant wind," 
as it was called, came, and the expedition sailed from 
Helvoetsluys. * The weather at every turn proved most 
favorable ; the wind that blew briskly from the east 
detained the King's vessels of war helplessly in the 
Thames, while it carried the fleet of the prince prosper- 
ously down the channel — it turned to the south when 
he wished to enter Torbay — it sank to a calm during 
the disembarkation — and as soon as the disembarkation 
was completed, it rose to a storm, and met the pursuers 
in the face. So remarkable was all this — so timely and 
favorable was each particular change — that pious men 
naturally regarded it as nothing less than the interposi- 
tion of God in answer to their prayers, f 

But we need not further multiply instances of this 
kind. — Now, those immediately concerned and most 
deeply interested in all the foregoing events, as we have 
seen, devoutly recognized the Hand of God in them. 
The godly men of Plymouth Colony believed that the 
timely rain which saved at once their crops and their 
lives was sent in answer to their prayers. The good 
people of New England believed that the storm which 
delivered them from the violence and oppression of the 
French was raised by God in answer to their united 
cries, and that while they were yet speaking. The pant- 
ing Covenanters believed that in the advancing cloud of 
mist they saw the very hand of God drawing as a curtain 



* Keightley's History of England, Vol. II., p. 382. 
f Macaulay's History of England, Vol. II., p. 378. 



124 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

his skirts round about them. Queen Elizabeth and the 
godly among her people believed that in answer to their 
earnest supplications the Almighty breathed upon and 
dispersed the great Armada. The pious Protestants, in 
the reign of James, who had besought the Lord with 
tears for their beloved country, believed their prayers 
were answered in the favoring winds that brought the 
Deliverer to their shores. All these prayed, all believed 
their prayers were answered. And what reason have 
toe, of the present day, to doubt this ? What light do 
we possess that warrants us to say that they were mis- 
taken ? What is there among all the developments of 
modern science that justifies us in the assertion, that 
such prayers were not and could not have been answered ? 
Not anything. There is nothing in the constitution of 
the universe, nothing in the operation of physical Laws, 
as understood to-day, to forbid implicit belief that these 
several deliverances might have come in answer direct 
to the prayers of faith. God might have sent the timely 
rain, the destructive storm, the sheltering mist and the 
favoring winds, at his people's cry — not by suspending 
or perverting the usual operations of physical forces, or 
by reversing any of the established successions that are 
known to take place in the ever-restless, ever-heaving 
atmosphere — but by so adjusting or balancing the forces 
of nature as that in their wonted mode and order of 
operation they produced those precise results at the 
needed time ; which adjustment or balancing might have 
been effected by Him, from whom all force emanates, as 
by a breath, among the deep workings of materialism, 
far beyond the search or science of man. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 125 

All power resides in God ; from Him proceed all the 
energies manifested in the material creation ; and at a 
point so near the Divine Source as to be unapproacha- 
ble to human philosophy, each energy or force may 
receive from the Divine Will such an impression as that 
their combined influence shall result at any time, or in 
any place, in a direct and complete answer to the prayer 
of faith. While all things that lie within the sphere of 
human test or observation may proceed according to 
their established order, yet an unseen influence behind, 
and far behind the utmost limit of man's research or 
discovery, may have decided their mutual bearings, and 
so, the final result in which they shall issue — and that 
unseen influence may have been put forth at the impor- 
tunity of prayer — the power that moves Him who moves 
the universe ; and who, without violence to the known 
regularities of nature, can send rain or sunshine, pesti- 
lence or salubrity, foster or destroy the hopes of the hus- 
bandman, and rouse or assuage the storm for or against 
the mariner, at His pleasure. Such is the teaching of 
the New Testament, such is the comforting persuasion 
of Christian Faith, and all the new light of this nine- 
teenth century has revealed nothing to invalidate it. 

Prayer for tpie Sick. 

Among the favors for which the New Testament Scrip- 
tures specifically warrant and encourage us to pray is 
the recovery or relief of the sick. " Is any among you 
afflicted ? let him pray," says the Apostle James. And 
again, " Is any sick among you ? let him call for the 



126 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

elders of the church, and let them pray for him, and the 
prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall 
raise him up." Prayer is ever alike our duty and our 
privilege ; but there is no place where it is more appro- 
priate or needful, than by the bed-side of the sick. 
When health has fled — when strength has failed — when 
vain has become the help of man — when death ap- 
proaches — to whom can we look for succor but to Al- 
mighty God ? Nature itself, in such circumstances, both 
teaches and prompts us to call upon Him. And the 
prayers then offered have brought relief and inspired 
hope a thousand and a thousand times when every 
earthly source had failed. There is, indeed, real and 
availing comfort to the helpless sufferer in pouring his 
complaints into the ear of the Father of mercies. The 
last resource, the last hope of afflicted millions, would be 
taken away, if men were denied access to the throne of 
grace. And yet, heartless and unnatural as it is, the 
attempt is made by materialists to strike even this last 
plank from under the sinking sufferer. They would 
sever the connection of the human spirit with its God, 
and leave it a helpless, bewildered and cheerless wan- 
derer amid the workings of cold and inexorable laws, 
with no Comforter in the time of trouble, no Helper to 
whom the fainting heart can turn, no Hope to which the 
sinking soul can cling. 

Among the devotees of science, in the present day, is 
a class, to whom the Deity has become nothing more, 
nothing else than the play of a set of blind unconscious 
forces. These, as mere physicists, holding that all the 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 127 

chemical processes and all the physical Laws of our being 
infallibly and inflexibly work out their results, engage to 
assure us that prayer for the sick, therefore, can change 
nothing, can effect nothing either to mitigate the severity 
or to arrest the progress of disease. In short, they plainly 
tell us that all such prayers are useless, and therefore 
thrown upon the air. Thus Mr. Tyndall, speaking of 
Cholera cases, says : " To alter by prayer the conse- 
quences of this, or any similar fact — to deprive by peti- 
tion a single molecule of miasmatic matter of its proper- 
ties — would, in the eye of science, be as much a miracle 
as to make the sun and moon stand still. For one of 
these results neither of us would pray; on the same 
grounds I refuse to pray for either." * 

Another individual of this sceptic school, evidently 
with more assumption than devotion, proposes an actual 
experiment on the Throne of Grace, to test the value of 
prayer for the sick. " I ask," he says, " that one single 
ward of a hospital under the care of first-rate physicians 
and surgeons, containing certain numbers of patients 
afflicted with those diseases which have been best 
studied, and of which the mortality rates are best known, 
whether the diseases are those treated by medical or by 
surgical remedies, should be, during a period of not less, 
say, than three or five years, made the object of special 
prayer by the whole body of the faithful, and that, at 
the end of that time, the mortality rates should be com- 
pared with the past rates, and also with that of other 



* Pall Mall Gazette, October 19, 1865. 



128 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

leading hospitals similarly well managed, during the 
same period. Granting that time is given and numbers 
are sufficiently large, so as to ensure a minimum of error 
from accidental disturbing causes, the experiment will 
be exhaustive and complete. — I might have proposed to 
treat two sides of the same hospital, managed by the 
same men ; one side to be the object of special prayer, 
the other to be exempted from all prayer. It would 
have been the most rigidly logical and philosophical 
method. But I shrink from depriving any from — I had 
almost said — his natural inheritance in the prayers of 
Christendom. Practically, too, it would have been im- 
possible ; the unprayed-for ward would have attracted 
the prayers of believers as surely as the lofty tower 
attracts the electric fluid. The experiment would be 
frustrated. But the opposite character of my proposal 
will commend it to those who are naturally the most 
interested in its success; those, namely, who conscien- 
tiously and devoutly believe in the efficiency against 
disease and death of special prayer. I open a field for 
the exercise of their devotion. I offer an occasion of 
demonstrating to the faithless an imperishable record 
of the real power of prayer." * 

This proposal, throughout, indicates in its author an 
utter misconception of both the nature and conditions 
of true prayer; and Christian people cannot become 
parties to such a scheme without renouncing the funda- 
mental principles of their religion, and thus render every 



* Contemp. Revieio, July, 1872. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 129 

prayer which they may offer utterly worthless. Against 
this scheme of Test there lie the following fatal ob- 
jections : 

(1.) Such a Test is not authorized, not acceded to, by 
the first and highest Party concerned, and is therefore vain. 
To be of any value or avail, it should have the approval 
of God ; nay, should have proceeded from God, as in the 
contest of Elijah with the priests of Baal. It is not for 
man thus to propose terms or tests to his Maker. With- 
out the Divine sanction no human being has a right 
either to make or to accept such a proposition. 

(2.) This experiment is in contradiction to the very 
spirit of prayer ; for, to carry it out, requires the violation 
of a Christian principle, and the neglect of a commanded 
duty. Love, sympathy and prayer for all men is an 
essential element of Christian character. Prayer, there- 
fore, from a heart that wilfully limits its sympathies, as 
here proposed, is, by the act, worthless. No man of 
godliness could designedly, as this scheme requires, con- 
fine his sympathies and prayers for a day, much less 
" from three to five years," to the inmates of a single 
ward, or a single hospital, to the exclusion and neglect 
of all others. To do so would at once disqualify him to 
offer any acceptable prayer. 

(3.) In the word of God, answer is promised only to 
sincere and singleminded prayer; but this proposal 
necessarily involves insincerity and doublemindedness ; 
since what is nominally asked, namely the recovery of 
the patients, is not the real and ultimate object, but the 
proving of their influence with God through prayer. 



130 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

(4.) The experiment is impracticable. "The whole 
J}ody of the faithful " can never be brought to agree in 
such a thing. The wards and hospitals excluded and 
neglected — and it is proposed to exclude and neglect 
all save one — would for that very reason (as the writer 
seems to apprehend) all the more engage the sympathies 
and prayers of all true believers, " as surely as the lofty 
tower attracts the electric fluid." 

(5.) This proposed Test is arrogant and impious, as it 
would take judgment and decision out of the hands of 
the Supreme. In answering prayer God exercises sov- 
ereign wisdom, which weighs all the relations to himself 
of both the suppliant and the object of his prayer, as 
well as the interests of all concerned — a sovereignty not 
to be interfered with by any proposal from man — though 
made by a member of the Athenceum Club ! 

(6.) The selected Ward or Hospital having been 
prayed for through the specified term, it is proposed to 
compare its rates of recoveries and deaths with those of 
a former period of the same length : but this would be 
to compare them with the rates of a period that had 
been prayed for in precisely the same way; for there 
never was a time when " the body of the faithful " did 
not pray for all that were sick and afflicted. So that 
this great Test, proposed with such pomp of diction and 
array of scientific technicalities, after all, amounts only 
to the very simple thing of comparing like with Wee, 
whereby nothing is gained. 

When the unbelievers of our Saviour's time required 
of Him a sign, He told them that they had evidence 



THE LAWS OF NATURE, 131 

enough already, and declared that if they believed not 
Moses and the prophets, neither would they believe 
though one rose from the dead — a declaration that was 
fully verified when a short time after He rose Himself 
from the dead, and those Jews continued as incredulous 
as ever. The same, there is room to apprehend, would 
hold true of those who desire this test, even were they 
to see every patient in a hospital rise together, take up 
their beds, and walk away to their homes — they would 
ascribe the event to any influence rather than to that 
of prayer. 

The materialist would have us establish a truth or a 
duty of religion, after the same manner that he does 
a fact in nature. But the demand is unreasonable- — 
indeed, absurd. Moral evidence and material evidence 
differ in their very nature, yet the former may con- 
stitute a proof as conclusive as the latter. And the 
Christian has as unquestionable proof that God answers 
prayer, as the physicist has that cold condenses atmos- 
pheric moisture into a shower, or that heat evaporates 
that shower again from the ground. We maintain, and 
shall now undertake to demonstrate that — 

Prayer may secure to the Sich physical benefits of the 
most important nature, and that tvithout miracle, and 
without infringement of any natural Law. 

We might argue this from general principles. It is 
said, and rightly, that the voice of nature is the voice 
of God — it proclaims what God has done, and what He 
has ordained. Now prayer is the voice of nature, is the 
'instinctive cry of creature weakness and dependence. 



132 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

In pressing need, in imminent danger, or helpless suffer- 
ing, the deepest and the strongest feelings of the human 
heart prompt to prayer. When earthly comforts flee, 
when help from man fails, when hope from the world 
is vanishing, the mind of its own promptings rises above 
every creature relation, and goes out beyond all that is 
visible, for the succor which it needs ; in such circum- 
stances, the innate religious sentiment of the soul is 
aroused, and addresses itself to God, and looks to Him 
alone for relief. This feeling is universal, is a general 
fact of nature, as clearly recognizable as the action of 
heat, or the force of gravitation. In every region of the 
globe, where the Bible is and where it is not, man's 
heart in one way or another cries out for the living God. 
What has been thus deeply and universally implanted 
by the Creator in the heart of man must be in harmony 
with His arrangements of the world around him, and 
with the principles of His government over him; for 
there are no jars, no gaps, no disconnected parts, in His 
works. Inborn religious sentiment, prompting to prayer, 
is an element of human nature, is an actual fact in the 
universe, and must be interpreted in harmony with the 
Laws of the universe. If God has so constituted His 
creature man, that he naturally and instinctively turns 
to Him in his extremities, we may be sure that a due 
provision has been made whereby his prayers may be 
answered, unless we believe that this religious instinct 
has been given to deceive and delude him — given to 
excite hopes that must be forever disappointed. God 
had never planted the ear had He not also provided 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 133 

means for the transmission of sound ; and He had never 
formed the eye, had He not likewise created light to 
illumine it. So our all-wise and loving Father in heaven 
would never have implanted these promptings to prayer 
in the human breast, had He not also intended to answer 
those prayers as might be wisest and best for them. To 
imbue man with a religious sentiment that quickens him 
to cry unto God, and then place him in a world under 
the control of a set of inflexible forces, that admit not 
of an answer to those cries, would be as though the 
Creator had implanted in the newborn infant the strong 
and craving instinct, which leads it to seek and to draw 
the mother's breast, while He had so formed that breast 
that not a drop of milk could ever flow into it or out 
of it. Thus nature itself, we believe, teaches us plainly 
that our Father in heaven would never have implanted 
in the hearts of His earthly offspring this instinctive 
propensity to call upon Him in time of trouble or need, 
had He so tied His own hands by a system of physical 
Laws that He could not respond to such cries, and ad- 
minister relief when wise to do so. 

We advance now to proof more direct of " the physical 
benefits of prayer for the sick," and our argument shall 
take the form of the following distinct propositions : 

1. (a) In prescribing for the sick, it is of vital impor- 
tance to choose the best remedy ; (b) In answer to prayer 
the physicians mind may be guided to that remedy ; 
(c) Therefore prayer may prove the means of great physical 
benefit to the sufferer, — This conclusion is to be accepted, 
or the premises must be disproved. 



134 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

(a) As to the first premise, that it is important to 
choose the best remedy, no one will doubt it ; no proof, 
therefore, of this is necessary. 

(b) And as to the second, that in answer to prayer 
the physician may be guided in his selection of medicine, 
no one that believes in the infinite power and wisdom 
of God will deny that He can do this ; to impart such 
guidance either by quickening the memory, or by in- 
clining the will, or by direct suggestion, presents no 
difficulty to the all-comprehending and all-pervading 
Spirit, who has free access to all the avenues of the soul. 
And this He may do while the individual is wholly un- 
conscious of the slightest interference with his mental 
operations ; for a thousand ideas arise in his mind, of 
the origin of which he can give no account. — Nor can 
any man, with the shadow of reason, say that God does 
not do this. Neither Mr. Tyndall, nor the whole school 
of scientists to which he belongs, can produce from any 
province of physical nature a single item of evidence 
that He does not thus often guide the minds of men ; 
and that for the simple reason that material nature has 
nothing to say on the subject, that it is utterly silent 
as to- spiritual influences or communications. 

But while nothing can be urged against this point, 
we have in its favor the plain and positive testimony of 
Scripture : " If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of 
God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, 
and it shall be given him again, " The meek will He 
guide in judgment, and the meek will He teach His 
way." We have in the same Word also numerous 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 135 

examples of such communications of wisdom or guidance. 
And all these together constitute what is to the Chris- 
tian a satisfactory and conclusive evidence. 

(c) As, then, the use of the best remedy is important 
to the patient's recovery, and the mind of the physician 
in answer to prayer may be guided to that remedy, it 
follows that we are warranted to believe that Prayer for 
the Sick may thus prove to him the means of great 
physical good. 

2. (a) A trusting, calm, and Jiope/ul frame of mind in 
a patient is always eminently helpful to Ms recovery ; 
(b) In answer to prayer the Holy Spirit may produce in 
him this favorable frame ; (c) Therefore prayer may prove 
to him the means of great physical benefit, namely Ms 
restoration to Jiealth. 

(a) A trusting, calm, and hopeful frame of mind is 
always eminently conducive to recovery from sickness. 
The proof of this can readily be adduced from our stand- 
ard medical authorities, among whom there is no diver- 
sity of opinion on the point. Few things, if any, are 
more detrimental to a patient, whatever his disease may 
be, than anxiety, fear, and despondency ; the medicine 
that will cure in such a case must possess virtue all but 
miraculous. And few remedies, if any, will contribute 
more efficiently to the restoration of health than a cheer- 
ful and hopeful mind ; and that medicine must be even 
pernicious which does not speedily work wonders, if taken 
with a full persuasion and expectation of rapid benefit. 

" The mind acts as clearly and distinctly on the 
body as either chemical, mechanical, or vital agency." 



136 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

Power of the Soul over the Body, by Dr. George Moore, 
M. R. C. P., p. 164. 

" Our passions are the grand conservators as well as 
disturbers of the healthy action of our bodies ; and they 
exercise so direct an influence over the functions of life 
as to be properly classified with medical agents. Indeed, 
they often act with no less power than the most heroic 
medicines, and are as rapid, and sometimes as fatal in 
their operation, as Prussic acid, or any other deadly 
poison." Ib., p. 224. 

" The mind acts on the ultimate vessels in which the 
changes of the blood are effected. Who has not felt the 
flash of thought suffusing the cheek, quickening the 
heart and kindling the eye? We all acknowledge by 
the blushes of love and pride and shame, or by the cold 
and pallor of our fears, that the affections of the mind 
possess dominion in the citadel of life, and permanently 
influence the whole economy of our bodies." Health, 
Disease and Remedy, p. 137. 

"The fibrillae, or terminal fibres of the nerves, are 
involved among the minute blood-vessels, and it is the 
office of the nerve-power to influence life and chemical 
action in those vessels; and here it is that life, mind 
and chemistry, meet together, so that every change in 
the state of the feelings produces a corresponding change 
in the blood, and every change of the blood influences 
the mind. Thus we find that the action of medicine 
is vastly modified by the state of the mind, and by the 
habitual activity of the brain, which in some measure 
accounts for the anomalies so often witnessed in the 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 137 

practice of physic, medicines in opposite states of feeling 
producing contrary effects on function." Ib., p. 138. 

" We meet with many instructive instances, proving 
that mental influence may often be made available in 
the cure of disease." See Brit & For, Med. Review, 1847. 

" Not a thought, not an idea, not an affection or feel- 
ing of the mind can be excited without positive change 
in the brain and in the secretions ; for every variation 
in the state of the whole, or any portion, of the nervous 
system, is of course accompanied by a correspondent 
change in those organs and functions which it furnishes 
with energy." Dr. G. Moore's Power of the Soul over the 
Body, p. 163. 

" The state of the blood, on which health mainly de- 
pends, is influenced almost as much by our feelings as 
by our food." IK, 234. 

" Very many diseases have a mental origin ; and per- 
haps there is no cause of corporeal disease more clearly 
made out, or more certainly effective, than protracted 
anxiety and distress of mind. — Our passions and emo- 
tions also, nay, even some of our better impulses, when 
strained or perverted, tend to our physical destruction." 
Watsons Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic, 
p. 59. 

" Fear and anxiety diminish the action of the lungs, 
impede the changes among the ultimate molecules of our 
bodies, interrupt all the secretions except that of water, 
and produce a cold, harsh, and pallid state of the skin. 
The genial passions, however, operate in a manner quite 
the reverse, and a man whose affections are in a pros- 



138 THE LAWS OF NATURE, 

perous condition, has rarely occasion to complain of 
functional inactivity. But all our emotions are capable 
of destroying life if carried to excess, and therefore they 
all, more or less, interfere with the proper action of that 
centre of sympathy, the stomach, by accumulating irrita- 
bility in the brain, while diminishing the energy of that 
nerve-action by which organic functions are carried on." 
Health, Disease and Remedy, by George Moore, M.D., 
M. R. C. P., p. 136. 

" Next to the brain the stomach suffers from continued 
mental distress. The appetite fails; digestion is sus- 
pended ; atrophy succeeds, and perhaps some nerve-ache 
racks the sufferer. Sometimes pulmonary consumption, 
or disease of the heart, the liver, or the bowels, is in- 
duced. The secretions are, of course, proportionally 
affected. Thus the milk of a nurse is often entirely 
suppressed by mental disquietude. Hence a nervous, 
excitable woman is hardly fit to suckle her own chil- 
dren ; for the fluid that should nourish her infant under- 
goes so many changes, from the mother's mental varia^ 
tions, as greatly to distress the child, and perhaps even 
to destroy it. Ninety-eight out of a hundred deaths from 
convulsions are of children, thus proving them to be 
especially liable to this disorder; and as the majority 
die in early infancy, it is not unlikely that the state of 
the mother's mind may be the secret cause of this un- 
natural mortality." Power of the Soul over the Body, 
pp. 237, 238. 

"A soul that condemns its own conduct is sure to 
produce disorders of the nervous system, and hence also 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 139 

of the blood in all its vital operations. — There is but one 
cause of misery, disease, and death to man. Let us shun 
that, and we need not be very nice about the choice of 
our diet, or our doctor, for, after all, the grand secret 
of health is to be happy at heart. — The rules of the 
New Testament are promotive of bodily health, as well 
as health of soul, and they are really sufficient in most 
cases for the direction of appetite in the use of means, 
and in them we learn why we should be temperate, active, 
holy." Health, Disease and Remedy, p. 140. 

" The love of God," says the celebrated Dr. G. Cheyne, 
" as it is the sovereign remedy of all misery, so, in par- 
ticular, it effectually prevents all the bodily disorders 
the passions introduce, by keeping the passions them- 
selves within due bounds ; and by the unspeakable joy 
and perfect calm, serenity, and tranquillity it gives the 
mind, becomes the most powerful of all the means of 
health and long life." 

The foregoing authorities fully prove, and abundantly 
illustrate, the truth of the major premise in our argu- 
ment, namely, that a trusting, calm, and hopeful frame 
of mind is always eminently helpful to recovery from 
disease. 

(b) And now for the second, that in answer to prayer 
the Holy Spirit may produce in the patient this favorable 
state of mind. To this the materialist has nothing to 
oppose ; neither from the subjects of his experiments, 
nor from the whole field of his observation, can he 
adduce anything that will serve him to weaken the 
statement by the shadow .of a doubt ; for, as stated in 



140 THE LAWS OF NATURE, 

the first proposition, material nature has nothing to say 
for or against Divine Spiritual influences. This is a 
matter purely of Revelation and personal experience. 
In tha New Testament we are plainly taught, and 
assured in every variety of terms, that the Holy Spirit 
is freely given to them that ask — given unconditionally, 
given always, and to all, in answer to believing prayer. 
And we are also told that "the fruit of the Spirit is 
love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 
meekness, temperance "—which are the precise elements 
of mind that the experienced and skilful physician 
would desire to find in his patient. Yes, they who with 
humility and faith seek the Lord, find rest from their 
burden of anxiety and fear, find peace which the world 
cannot give, and attain to a hope that is both sure and 
steadfast — constituting altogether the very condition of 
soul which Dr. Cheyne declares to be " the most power- 
ful of all the means of health." And to the truth of 
these promises, and the reality of these influences of the 
Spirit, the believers of all ages past have borne stead- 
fast and unvaried witness. And thousands and tens of 
thousands to-day, in every Christian land, stand ready 
to attest the truth and reality of the same from their 
personal experience, from the deep and happy conscious- 
ness of their own souls. So that, if any kind of Scrip- 
ture testimony, or any amount of historic evidence, or 
any number of living witnesses, or all of these together, 
can establish any fact, then the truth of our second 
premise is clearly and conclusively demonstrated, to wit, 
that the Holy Spirit in answer to prayer may produce 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 141 

in the patient a trusting, calm, and hopeful frame of 
mind. 

(c) Since, as has now been proven, a trusting, calm, 
and hopeful state of mind is eminently helpful to recov- 
ery from sickness ; and since the Holy Spirit in answer 
to prayer may beget that happy frame ; therefore prayer 
may be the means of great " physical benefit " to the 
sick in his restoration to health. 

3. (a) Resignation ever lightens and relieves the burden 
of the Sufferer ; (b) Prayer to God begets a spirit of resig- 
nation ; (c) Therefore prayer to God may prove the means 
of u physical benefit" physical relief to the sick. 

(a) As impatience, fretfulness, or a rebellious spirit, 
must excite, inflame, or exasperate every malady, and 
thus realizes to the Sufferer the evil symbolized by the 
refractory ox kicking against the goad — to wit, the aggra- 
vation of his own misery ; so Christian resignation fails 
not to soothe the frame and tranquillize the spirit of the 
afflicted, whatever his trial may be. The resigned soul 
recognizes the hand of God in his suffering, and believes 
it to be sent upon him in ivisdom and in love — believes 
that all things work together for good to them that love 
God. " Good," he says, 

" Good, when He gives, supremely good ! 
Nor less, when He denies ; 
Even crosses from His sovereign hand 
Are blessings in disguise."— Her vey. 

When the Sufferer can view the dealings of God with 
him in this light, and from the depths of his soul add, 
"Thy will be done" oh, this takes from the burden its 



142 THE LAWS OF NATURE, 

galling weight, from grief its chief poignancy, and from 
suffering its sharpest edge. And in this way Christian 
resignation helps, as nothing else can help, the patient 
to bear his burden of affliction. 

(b) Prayer to God begets this spirit of resignation. 
This is not a product of the natural heart, but is a fruit 
of the Holy Spirit, and given only in answer to prayer. 
A man may work himself into a spirit of stoicism, or 
hardihood ; but the Holy Spirit only produces this calm 
and trustful yielding of ourselves to the disposal of God, 
which alone soothes and tranquillizes the soul in deep 
affliction. 

(c) Since, then, resignation ever lightens and relieves 
the burden of the Sufferer, and prayer to God begets 
this spirit, it follows that prayer may thus prove the 
means of great physical benefit to the sick. " Medical 
practitioners," says Dr. Moore, "can bear ample testi- 
mony to the fact, that religious feeling, that is, calm 
resignation to the Supreme Will, soothes and tranquillizes 
the sufferer's frame more than all medical appliances." 

4. (a) Faith in Christ enables the side to rise superior to 
all the fears and sufferings of dissolution, and to triumph 
even over death ; (b) This Faith is to be attained through 
Prayer in His name ; (c) Therefore prayer may prove the 
means of inestimable benefit in our final physical struggle. 

(a) Death is a solemn and important event in man's 
history. It is the moment of destiny — the seal of eter- 
nity — the cessation of probation — the commencement 
of retribution. The antecedents are awful — so are the 
accompaniments — so are the consequents. To every 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 1 < 3 

sense it is appalling — to every social affection crucify- 
ing — to reason perplexing — to everything but Faith 
overwhelming. This and this only can change its aspect, 
extract its sting, or soften its stroke ; and this can. Yes, 
Christian Faith can give the soul a joyful and illustrious 
triumph over death. 

Faith in the " Blood of Atonement " brings home to 
the soul a sense of pardon, and an experience of peace 
with God. Faith discovers to the Christian that death 
to him has lost its sting, and the grave been despoiled 
of its boasted victory. Faith brings assurance that our 
Father in heaven concerns Himself to determine the time 
and place, the means and the manner of death to every 
believer; and the thought that infinite wisdom and 
infinite love have been engaged in arranging all these, 
is full of precious and unspeakable comfort. Faith holds 
sweet and hallowed communion with a living present 
Saviour, and reveals amid celestial splendors the bright 
and holy mansions he has made ready for his ransomed 
people. And Faith brings down cherub guards from 
glory to conduct to those mansions in joyous triumph 
the soul when liberated from the earthly house of this 
tabernacle. 

What scenes, transcending all that poetry can describe 
or fiction can imagine, are to be witnessed in the cham- 
bers of dying saints ! How often has it seemed as if the 
veil were drawn aside, and the scenes of the celestial 
world were actually visible to the eye of sense — faith, 
being in more lively exercise than e'er before, piercing 
through the veil of mortality, and roaming abroad amidst 



144 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

the realms of celestial glory. Hence it is that we so 
often hear that triumphant exclamation — death, where 
is thy sting ? grave, where is thy victory ? 

Great is the power of Christian Faith. Through faith, 
persons at all periods of life, of every variety of bodily 
constitution, male and female, have nobly risen above 
the fear and above the pain of every kind of disease and 
every degree of violence, and calmly conquered, yea, even 
exulted, over the last enemy. A member of the Royal 
College of Surgeons gives this touching description of a 
youth who lately adorned the drawing-room and had 
borne the palm of academic strife : " While in the bloom 
and brilliancy of body and mind, when most sensitive 
and alive to all the passionate and beautiful associations 
of affection and of intellect, the spoiler (consumption) 
stealthily crept in ; but previously a light from heaven 
had entered his heart, and therefore, while the malady 
was building up the barrier between time and his spirit, 
the patient relied upon the Hand that chastened him ; 
he felt that pain, and weakness, and weariness, and dis- 
appointment, and death are not fortuitous occurrences, 
but the process by which the wisdom of God effects the 
weaning and separation of the believing soul from sin, 
sorrow, and distracting attachments, to fill it forever 
with intelligence, peace and perfection. Hence, with 
becoming composure, he submitted to the purifying trial 
of his faith, and said, while his features reflected the 
Divine Love which he contemplated — Even so, Father, 
for so it seemeth good in thy sight. No fever of the mind 
added to the hectic which consumed his body, and the 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 145 

disease was not only borne, but really much retarded 
and ameliorated by the strong consolations of a Chris- 
tian faith." 

A minister of Christ, having been sent for to visit 
a Western cabin, found in it a father and his dying 
daughter, surrounded by evidences of intelligence and 
refinement. They were of Quaker associations. He 
asked the daughter if she knew her situation. " I know 
that my Redeemer liveth," said she in a voice of subdued 
and heavenly sweetness. A half-hour passed, and she 
spoke in the same melodious tone, " Father, I am cold." 
And the old man reclined by his dying child, endeavor- 
ing to restore warmth to her stiffening limbs ; and she 
twined her emaciated arms around his neck, and mur- * 
mured in a subdued voice, " Dear Father, dear Father ! " — 
" My child," said the old man, " doth the flood seem deep 
to thee ?" — " Nay, father, for my soul is strong." — " Seest 
thou the thither shore?" — "I see it, father; and its 
banks are green with immortal verdure." — " Hearest 
thou the voices of its inhabitants?" — "I hear them, 
father, as the voices of angels falling from afar in the 
still and solemn night time; and they call me. Her 
voice, too, father : Oh ! I heard it then." — " Doth she 
speak to thee ?" — "She speaketh in tones most heavenly." 
— "Doth she smile?" — "An angel smile; a calm and 
holy smile. But I am cold, cold, cold ! Father, there's 
a mist in the room. You'll be lonely, lonely. Is this 
death, father?"— "It is death, Mary."— " Thank God!" 
And as these sweet words died away upon her lips, her 
tranquil spirit returned to Him who gave it. 



146 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

"And is this death ?— Dread thing!— 
If such thy visiting, 

How beautiful thou art ! " 

Schiller, when dying, was asked how he felt — " Calmer 
and calmer," was his reply. And the Kev. Charles Sim- 
eon when his soul was about departing said, " There is 
now nothing but peace, sweetest peace" And Dr. Edward 
Payson when near his end, and apparently racked with 
pain, was asked if he felt reconciled — " Reconciled ! " he 
responded — " oh, that is too cold ; I rejoice, I triumph ! 
I can find no words to express my happiness. I seem 
to be swimming in a river of pleasure, which is carrying 
me on to the Great Fountain." 

"Is that a death-bed where the Christian lies? 
Yes, but not Ms; 'tis Death itself there dies." 

The history of martyrdom records victories of faith 
more illustrious still, if possible. John Noyes, when 
brought to the stake, kissed it, and said, " Blessed be the 
time that ever I was born for this day!" — Mr. Hawkes, 
being asked by his friends to give them some token that 
the fire was not so intolerable but that a man might 
keep his mind quiet and patient, promised to give them 
such a token — he would lift his hands above his head 
before he died. An eye-witness states that at the stake 
he mildly addressed himself to the flames, and when his 
speech was taken away, and his skin drawn together, and 
his fingers consumed so that all thought him dead, he, 
in remembrance of his promise, suddenly lifted up his 
blackened and burning hands, and clapped them together 
three times, as if in great joy. — James Bainham, also, 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 147 

having half his arms and legs consumed, spake these 
words : " Ye look for miracles ! Here, now, ye may see 
one. This fire is a bed of roses to rne." 

These instances, and a thousand others similar to them 
that might be adduced, sufficiently prove that Christian 
Faith has power to raise the sick and tortured superior 
to all fears and to all pains, and to enable them to 
triumph nobly even over death itself. 

(b) Now this " Faith is the gift of God," and is to be 
attained by prayer. It has its degrees, differing in its 
strength in different individuals, and admitting of in- 
crease in all. The means of its growth are the enlight- 
ening of the mind into a stronger conviction of the truth 
of the Gospel, and the disposing of the heart into a more 
cordial and loving acquiescence in it. This is effected 
through Divine influence, it being the office-work of the 
Holy Spirit. Hence the duty and necessity of constant 
prayer to God in the language of the afflicted parent, 
"Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief," and of the 
astonished disciples saying, " Lord, increase our faith." 
In answer to such petitions the Holy Spirit builds up 
the Christian in this most holy and precious faith, until 
he " abounds in hope," and is " filled with joy and peace 
in believing." While it is true that in order to this the 
Patient's own prayers are indispensable, yet the prayers 
of others with him and for him may be of essential aid 
and benefit to him. Many times the sick is little capa- 
ble of praying himself, and it is to him a privilege and 
a help to have a fellow-Christian lead his thoughts in 
devotion. Besides, the prayer of a good man may avail 



148 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

much to strengthen his faith and to cheer his heart. 
Faith is " a fruit of the Spirit/' and the Spirit is promised 
and given in answer to prayer. 

(c) Since, then, as has now been shown, Faith in Christ 
enables the sick to rise superior to all the fears and 
sufferings of dissolution, and to triumph even over death ; 
and since this Faith is to be attained through prayer ; 
it follows, therefore, that prayer may prove the means 
of great benefit to him in his final physical struggle — 
benefit not to be brought down into comparison with 
any temporary profits, or to be estimated by any coin or 
currency of this world. " I know I am dying," said the 
devoted John Pawson, " but my death-bed is a bed of 
roses ; I have no thorns planted upon my dying pillow. 
Heaven is already begun ; everlasting life is won, is won, 
is won ! I die a safe, easy, happy death. Thou, my 
God, art present ; I know, I feel that thou art. Precious 
Jesus ! Glory, glory, be to God !" 

From all that has now been stated, we hold that we 
are fully warranted and abundantly encouraged to offer 
" prayers for the sick " — for their relief and restoration. 
We do not suppose, however, that our prayers are going 
to change God in his views or disposition ; He need not 
change to answer prayer; this He hath ever purposed 
to do, and hath as really and truly ordained prayer as 
a condition of bestowing blessings, as He hath appointed 
ploughing and sowing as a condition of reaping a har- 
vest. — We do not pray for the sick in an arbitrary or 
unconditional manner, but in deference to the wisdom 
and in humble submission to the will of God. 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 149 

Nor in praying for the afflicted do we expect God to 
work miracles ; but to guide effort and to bless means. 
We do not look for broken bones to be instantaneously 
cemented together ; or for vitiated blood and fluids to be 
sent, as in a moment, corrected and renovated through 
the whole system : but we do look for such kindly and 
gracious influences to be bestowed upon the sufferer's 
mind as shall put his entire nervous system, and through 
it, all his vital functions, in the condition most favorable 
to knit the former and to purify the latter. Health of 
soul is health to the body also. And we do not expect 
" to deprive by petition a single molecule of miasmatic 
matter of its properties ;" but we may ask and hope to 
be guided to remedies that shall effectually counteract 
the influence of that miasmatic molecule in the system. 

We hold that in the foregoing Propositions we have a 
fourfold demonstration of " the physical value of prayers 
for the sick." In answer to prayer the judgment of the 
physician may be guided to the best of remedies — in the 
use of that remedy the patient's mind may be disposed 
into such a trusting, calm, and hopeful frame as may 
prove most conducive to his recovery — or if Divine Wis- 
dom shall see fit that his restoration be delayed, he may 
be imbued with such resignation as shall sweetly lighten 
and relieve him of more than half his burden of suffer- 
ings — or should it prove the Will of God that he must even 
die, he may be inspired with that supporting and sublime 
faith, that shall render him superior to fear and pain, and 
enable him to triumph gloriously over death itself. 

Are not all these physical benefits — and physical 



150 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

benefits, too, of the most precious and important nature 
to the Sufferer, and such as nothing but prayer to the 
Father of Mercies and God of all grace could secure for 
him ? In them he, if none other, recognizes the hand 
of God as clearly as if the sun and moon stood still ; and 
he blesses and praises God also as devoutly and ardently 
as if those luminous orbs had actually been made to pause 
in mid-heavens to effect these very benefits for him. 

In these or similar ways God, we believe, often works, 
if not miracles, yet wonders of healing in answer to 
prayer. And of this it would be easy to adduce exam- 
ples, both convincing and instructive, to almost any 
extent. In answer to the prayer of Abraham, the family 
of Abimelec was delivered from the sad distresses in 
which it was involved. — Hezekiah was sick nigh unto 
death, but through the blessing of God, granted in 
answer to prayer, upon the medical means used for his 
recovery, he was restored, and his life lengthened for a 
period of fifteen years. " I have heard thy prayer, and 
seen thy tears ; and thou shalt recover," was the joyful 
answer given him : and, " The living, the living, shall 
praise thee this day ; and the father to the children shall 
make known thy truth," was his grateful response. 

Philip Melancthon, Luther's most dear friend and 
fellow-laborer, was lying, at a certain time, at the point 
of death. Information was sent to Luther with all haste. 
On his arrival he found him presenting all the usual 
premonitory symptoms of death — the fixed unconscious 
eye, the cold clammy sweat, the insensible lethargy. 
Upon witnessing these sure indications of a speedy 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 151 

dissolution, as he mournfully bent over him, he ex- 
claimed with great emotion, "Oh, how awful is the 
change wrought upon the visage of my dear brother !" 
On hearing his voice, Melancthon, to the astonishment 
of all present, opened his eyes, looked up, and said, 
" Luther, is this you ? Why don't you let me depart 
in peace?" — "We cannot spare you yet, Philip," was 
the reply. Luther then turned away from the bed, and 
fell upon his knees, with his face toward the window, 
and wrestled with God in prayer ; he continued to plead 
with great fervency upward of an hour for his friend's 
recovery. He then rose from prayer, and w T ent to the 
bed-side again, and took Melancthon by the hand. 
Upon this he again entreatingly said, " dear Luther, 
w r hy don't you let me depart in peace?" — "No, no, 
Philip, we cannot possibly spare you from the field of 
labor yet," was the answer. Luther then requested the 
nurse to go and prepare some nourishment, according to 
his instructions. When this was brought in, Melancthon 
was requested to take a little of it; but he declined, 
again saying, " Dear Luther, why will you not let me 
go home, and be at rest?" To which Luther replied as 
before, " Philip, we cannot spare you yet." Still de- 
clining to taste what had been prepared, Luther at 
length, deeming some decisive measure necessary, said, 
"Philip, take this, or I will excommunicate you." 
Philip, upon this, took a little ; he soon began to amend, 
and ere long was restored to his wonted health and 
strength, and continued for many years to labor with 
great efficiency in the good cause of the Reformation. 



152 THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

When Luther returned home, he said to his wife with 
joy, "God gave me my brother Melancthon back in 
direct answer to prayer;" and then added, with patri- 
archal simplicity. "And God, on a former occasion, gave 
me you back, Kata, in answer to my prayer also." 

Rev. Thomas Charles, of Bala, Wales, was a man of 
great piety, great learning, and great usefulness : among 
his literary productions was a Polyglot Dictionary of the 
Bible, a work of vast research and great merit; with 
him, also, originated that mightiest of Christian ma- 
chineries, The British and Foreign Bible Society, Some- 
what, now, over half a century ago, this good man was, 
to all human judgment, at the very point of death. In 
this critical, and as it seemed, hopeless hour, a prayer- 
meeting of his friends was held, in which earnest prayer 
to God was offered by all for his recovery, and by one 
aged Christian especially asking that fifteen years might 
be added to the useful life of his servant. These prayers 
were not " thrown upon the wind ;" Mr. Charles was 
restored to health, and his life prolonged to the exact 
extent pleaded for by the aged saint. He filled up'the 
fifteen added years with great usefulness, and in full 
expectation all along of release at the end of that period. 
On his last visit to some friends, he said that he could 
not expect to see them again, as he was now in the last 
year of his life. — Strange as it may seem, his death 
occurred just at the termination of the fifteen years. 

Instances, such as the foregoing, of what godly men 
have asked in prayer for the sick coming to pass in 
exact accordance with their requests, might be produced 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 153 

ad libitum. Now, if to all these it be said that the same 
results might have followed had no prayer been offered, 
we reply, And they might not have followed — thus one 
" perhaps " exactly balances another " perhaps," and the 
matter is left just where it was. But we affirm, that if in 
such cases, frequent and diversified as has been their oc- 
currence, there was no connection or relation between the 
prayers and what followed them, the coincidence would 
be more inexplicable, and their falling out by accident 
more incredible far, than that the Father of Mercies should 
hear and answer the prayers of his worshipping children. 

But in this matter we are not left to disputed exam- 
ples or doubtful inferences — we have the sure Word of 
Truth for our guide. To pray for our sick or suffering 
brethren and friends — for their relief, their comfort, their 
recovery — we have the clear authority and the gracious 
encouragement of the Great Teacher, whose commission 
from God, " To preach the gospel to the poor, to heal 
the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, 
and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them 
that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the 
Lord," is established by a number and diversity of evi- 
dences that constitute the mightiest and most convincing 
of demonstrations. With implicit faith and thankful 
hearts, therefore, we follow His instructions, and em- 
brace His promises, as with full hearts and tearful eyes 
we pray over our sick and dying kindred. 

"But if some frigid Sceptic still will dare - 
To doubt the all-prevailing power of Prayer ; 
As if 'twere ours, with impious zeal, to try 
To shake the purposes of Deity ; 



THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

Pause, cold philosopher, nor snatch away 
The last, the best, the wretched 's surest stay. 
Look round on life, and trace its checkered plan, 
The griefs, the joys, the hopes, the fears of man ; 
Tell me, if each deliverance, each success, 
Each transient golden dream of happiness, 
Each plan that genius in the race acquires, 
Each thrilling rapture virtuous pride inspires, — 
Tell me, if each and all were not combined 
In the great purpose of the Eternal Mind ? 

Thus while we humbly own the vast decree, 
Eormed in the bosom of Eternity, 
And know all secondary causes tend 
Each to contribute to one mighty end; 
Yet while these causes firmly fixed remain — 
Links quite unbroken in the endless chain, 
So that could one be snapped, the whole must fail* 
And wide confusion o'er the world prevail ; 
Why may not our petitions, which arise 
In humble adoration to the skies, 
Be foreordained the causes, whence shall flow 
Our purest pleasures in this vale of woe ? 
Not that they move the purpose that hath stood 
By time unchanged, immeasurably good, 
But that the event and prayer alike may be 
United objects of the same decree." — Durant. 



Theory of Evolution 



AND 



Man's Innocence, Fall and Redemption. 



Nature has been personified. Living beings have been called the works of 
nature. — Cuvier. 

The evolutionist plays with nature as he pleases, and makes her do what 
he wishes. — M. Flourens. 

J S5 



I. The Origin of Species: The insurmountable difficulties to the 
Development hypothesis : The honored chiefs of Science 
against it. 

II. Origin of Man : His incomparable superiority to the highest of 

THE SlMIAD^E OR APE FAMILY: SEPARATED FROM THEM BY A GULF 
PRACTICALLY INFINITE. 

156 



Theory of Evolution 

AND THE 

Innocence, Fall, and Redemption of Man. 



N the beginning God created the heaven and 

the earth, with all things that are therein ; 

the grass and herbs and trees of the dry 

land, the fishes of the sea, the fowls of the 

air, and the beasts of the field ; He created 

man also, in His own image created He him, 

male and female created He them. This is 

the Bible Record of creation; and this has been and 

still is the common view and common faith of the nations 

of Christendom — of wise and learned and great men, as 

well as of the multitude in general. Of late, however, 

another and a very different account of the origin of the 

world and of its living tenants has been invented and 

put forth with great confidence and boldness. A new 

theory, or, rather, an old theory under a new phase, has 

been wrought out with no little labor and ingenuity, 

which ascribes the origin and production of the existing 

order of things, not to the creative power and wisdom 

of God, but to the operation of the inherent powers and 

157 




158 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

tendencies of matter — we refer to what is called the 
Theory of Evolution. The advocates of this doctrine 
are not altogether at one in their views; hence the 
theory is presented to us under somewhat different 
aspects ; but the aspect of it with which we are chiefly 
concerned at present is that set forth by Mr. Charles 
Darwin, in his Origin of Species, of which his more 
recent work, The Descent of Man, is the natural and legiti- 
mate conclusion. 

This theory, as presented by Mr. Darwin, avowedly 
discards the inspired history of creation, and claims to 
be the record of visible and material nature, which may 
be read and known of all men. The scheme is this— 
The globe on which we dwell has existed through periods 
and cycles of time that practically amount to infinite dura- 
tion ; at an incalculably distant date in the past, life com- 
menced on our planet under a few low and simple forms, 
mere cells or minute bubbles ; under the action of light, 
heat, electricity, and other physical forces, these repro- 
duced their kind, each individual differing slightly from 
others by some trivial variation of form, size, weight, or 
color ; and these again in like manner had their offspring, 
which inherited their respective parental variations, and, 
in many instances, manifested beside them some new 
and additional ones of their own. In this way, repro- 
duction together with transmission and multiplication 
of individual peculiarities went on through successive 
and unnumbered generations. The process of variation 
advanced slowly, indeed, yet steadily, till animated 
beings presented very different forms, and became ad- 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. I59 

dieted to widely different modes and habits of life. As 
the unmeasured periods of the mighty past slowly rolled 
on, wider and wider grew the divergence, till distinct 
species, genera, and orders of animals were produced and 
established — some dwelling in the seas and rivers, some 
inhabiting the dry land, some flying through the air, and 
some burrowing in the ground. 

In the course of time, every species and individual, 
it is supposed by this theory, had to struggle more or 
less severely for existence, owing to the vast increase of 
all kinds of animals. Those which had inherited varia- 
tions that would in any degree aid them in this struggle, 
or that were of a kind tending to preserve their lives, or 
to enable them more surely to propagate their kind, were 
generally in the long run preserved, and transmitted 
their favorable peculiarities to some, if not to all, their 
offspring ; which peculiarities were thus from generation 
to generation gradually intensified, till at length they 
reached their highest degree of perfection and utility. 
On the other hand, individuals or species that had 
inherited unfavorable variations entered the struggle 
for existence under corresponding disadvantages, and 
consequently were the more easily worsted, oppressed, 
and destroyed ; so that generally in process of time they 
became extinct. In this way, it is said, Nature has all 
along been eliminating the feeble and ill-favored, and 
securing the survival of the fittest. This process is 
entitled " Natural Selection." * 



*Here we have selection without volition, an expression self- contra- 
dictory and absurd. 



1 QQ THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

It is by this twofold operation of " gradual variation " 
and " natural selection/' that the earth has fostered and 
gained from a few simple forms, three or four at most, it 
is supposed, all its present vast and magnificent variety 
of living tenants — its fishes and reptiles, its insects and 
worms, its birds and beasts, and even Man himself. 
Such is the Theory of Evolution. 

To show the reader (if that be necessary) that the 
above is a correct and fair representation of this wonder- 
working Scheme, we make the following quotations from 
Prof. Darwin's works : 

" The consideration of these facts " (indicating the 
vast periods occupied in the formation of the earth and 
the production of its inhabitants) " impresses the mind 
almost in the same manner as does the vain endeavor 
to grapple with the idea of eternity \T * 

" Life was originally breathed by the Creator into a 
few forms or into one ; and whilst this planet has gone 
cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from 
so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and 
most wonderful have been and are being evolved." -f 

" Slight individual differences suffice for the work, 
and are probably the sole differences which are effective 
in the production of new species." J 

" Natural Selection acts only by the preservation and 
accumulation of small inherited modifications, each modi- 
fication being profitable to the preserved animal." || 



* Origin of Species, 6th Ed., p. 269. f lb., p. 429. 

% Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol. II., p. 192. 
|| Origin of Species, 6tli Ed., p. 75. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION, \§\ 

" It may metaphorically* be said that Natural Selec- 
tion is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the 
world, the slightest variations, rejecting those that are 
bad, preserving and adding up all that are good ; silentty 
and insensibly working, whenever and wherever oppor- 
tunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being 
in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. 
We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until 
the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages." \ 

"Natural Selection, if it be a true principle, will 
banish the belief of any great and sudden modification 
in their structure." J 

u If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ- 
ism existed which could not possibly have been formed 
by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory 
would absolutely break down." || 

" Slight fluctuating differences in the individual suffice 
for the work of Natural Selection." § 

" To man I give a pedigree of prodigious length, if not 
of noble quality. The most ancient progenitors in the 
kingdom of the Vertebrata, at which we are able to 
obtain an obscure glance, apparently consisted of marine 
animals, resembling the larvie (or grubs) of existing 
Ascidians. Now, Ascidians are invertebrate, hermaphro- 
dite, marine creatures, permanently attached to a sup- 
port. They hardly appear like animals, and consist of 

*Here we have, not a " metaphor," but personification— & wide and 
most important difference, 
t Origin of Species, p. 65. X lb., p. 62, etc. || lb., p. 227. 
\ Descent of Man, Vol. II., p. 370. 
11 



1(52 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

a simple tough, leathery sack, with two small projecting 
orifices. They have recently been placed by some natu- 
ralists among the Vermes, or worms. Their larvae some- 
what resemble tadpoles in shape, and have the power of 
cwimming freely about. These animals probably gave 




An Ascidian. Ascidian Tadpole. 

Given to convey to the reader an idea of his " very remote Ancestors," according tu Mr. Darwin. 

rise to a group of fishes, as lowly organized as the Lance- 
let; and from these the Ganoids, and other fishes like 
the Lepidosiren, must have been developed. From such 
fish a very small advance would carry us on to the Am- 
phibians. We have seen that birds and reptiles were 
once intimately connected together; and the Monotre- 
mata now, in a slight degree, connect mammals with 
reptiles. But no one can at present say by what line 
of descent the three higher and related classes, namely, 
mammals, birds, and reptiles, were derived from either 
of the two lower vertebrate classes, namely, amphibians 
and fishes. In the class of mammals the steps are not 
difficult to conceive which led from the ancient monotre- 
mata to the ancient Marsupials ; and from these to the 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 163 

early progenitors of the placental mammals. We may 
thus ascend to the Lemuridas ; and the interval is not 
wide from these to the Simiadae. The Simiadge then 
branch off into two great stems, the New World and 
Old World monkeys ; and from the latter, at a remote 
period, Man, the wonder and glory of the Universe, pro- 
ceeded. If any single link in this chain had never 
existed, man would not have been exactly what he 
now is. Unless we wilfully close our eyes, we may, 
with our present knowledge, approximately recognize 
our parentage ; nor need we feel ashamed of it." * 

Such is the theory of Mr. Darwin, and such he im- 
agines to be the genealogy of the human family. The 
main and central idea in this theory of development, it 
will be observed, is, that by the occurrence, transmission, 
and aggregation of minute and fortuitous variations in 
the form, size, color, and habits of successive generations, 
all the present varieties of plants and animals, in the sea 
and on the land, have been produced. After the first 
breathing of life into a few simple forms, millions and 
millions of years ago, the evolution theory does not 
recognize and does not admit either Divine agency or 
Divine supervision, in furnishing or in peopling the world. 
Insensibly small and fortuitous variations, together with 
Natural Selection, have been the efficient instrumen- 
tality in the production of new species, new genera, new 
orders, and peopling the earth with its most beauts 
ful and most wonderful varieties of living tenants. In 



* Descent of 3£an, Vol. I., pp. 196, 203, 204, 205. 



1 64 THE OR Y OF E VOL UTION. 

other words, the existing organic world, animal as well 
as vegetable, abounding with designs, beauties, con- 
trivances and adaptations, past all description and all 
admiration, as it is by all confessed to be, is the result 
of haphazard or accidental accumulation of minute varia- 
tions. Truly, here is an illustrious proof of the old 
adage, " When philosophers set out to be foolish, there 
is no folly equal to theirs." 

Few readers need be reminded that this is a return 
to the notion put forth nearly twenty-four centuries 
ago — we refer to that of Democritus, who maintained 
that the world and all things therein were the result of 
" a fortuitous concourse of atoms." In nothing save the 
name, does the theory of Darwin essentially differ from 
the theory of Democritus, the absurdities of which have 
been exposed a thousand times and in a thousand differ- 
ent ways. Democritus exalted fortuitous atoms ! Darwin 
deifies minute variations ! Who hath the pre-eminence ? 
The present is often pronounced an era of progress, but 
in the matter before us, it would seem, of progress bach- 
ward. Here is the nineteenth century of Christianity 
going back to heathen Greece, and to heathen Greece in 
its very childhood and crudeness and ignorance. 

The theory of evolution, which thus excludes God 
from his own world, and ascribes his glorious works to 
fortuity, it hardly needs be said, is in direct conflict with 
the Mosaic account of creation. Yet Mr. Darwin tells 
us that " he can see no good reason why the views he 
has given to the world should shock the religious feelings 
of any." A celebrated author and divine, he informs us, 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. \§§ 

has written to him (for his consolation we suppose) that 
" he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble 
a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a 
few original forms capable of self-development into other 
and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh 
act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action 
of his laws." 

We are not surprised to find a mere Deist express 
himself as does Mr. Darwin here ; but how a Divine can 
consistently hold forth such language as this we are 
utterly at a loss to understand. Belief, mere belief in 
God, as the Creator of the world, may entitle a man to 
the credit of being a respectable Theist, but it does not 
constitute a Christian Divine. There are other doctrines, 
other " beliefs, in no degree less important to the moralist' 
or the Christian than even that in the being of a Gocl^ 
which seem wholly incompatible with the development 
hypothesis. If, during a period so vast as to be scarce ex- 
pressible by figures, the creatures now human have been 
rising, by almost infinitesimals, from compound micro- 
scopic cells, — minute vital globules, begot by electricity 
on dead gelatinous matter, — until they have at length 
become the men and women whom we see around us, 
we must hold either the monstrous belief, that all the 
vitalities, whether those of monads or of mites, of fishes 
or of reptiles, of birds or of beasts, are individually and 
inherently immortal and undying, or that human souls 
are not so. The difference between the dying and the un- 
dying, — between the spirit of the brute that goeth down- 
ward, and the spirit of the man that goeth upward,- — 



1 (3 6 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

is not a difference infinitesimally, or even atomically 
small. It passes all the breadth of the eternity to come, 
and is an infinitely great difference. 

"If the spirit of a monad or of a mollusc be not immor- 
tal, then must there either have been a point in the his- 
tory of the species at which a dying brute — differing from 
its offspring merely by an inferiority of development rep- 
resented by a few atoms, mayhap by a single atom — 
produced an undying man ; or man in his present state 
must be a mere animal, possessed of no immortal soul, 
and as irresponsible for his actions to the God before 
whose bar he is, in consequence, never to appear, as his 
presumed relatives and progenitors, the beasts that 
perish. Nor will it do to attempt escaping from the 
difficulty, by alleging that God at some certain link in 
the chain might have converted a mortal creature into 
an immortal existence, by breathing into it a 6 living 
soul;' seeing that a renunciation of any such direct 
interference on the part of Deity in the work of creation 
forms the prominent and characteristic feature of the 
scheme — nay, that it constitutes the very nucleus round 
which the scheme has originated. And thus, though the 
development theory be not atheistic, it is at least prac- 
tically tantamount to atheism. For, if man be a dying 
creature, restricted in his existence to the present scene 
of things, what does it really matter to him, for any 
one moral purpose, whether there be a God or no? If 
in reality on the same religious level with the dog, wolf 
and fox, that are by nature atheists — a nature most prop- 
erly coupled with irresponsibility — to what one practical 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 167 

purpose should he know or believe in a God whom he, as 
certainly as they, is never to meet as his Judge ? or why 
should he square his conduct by the requirements of 
the moral code, further than a low and convenient 
expediency may chance to demand?"* 

The Scripture plainly, emphatically, and throughout, 
declares that the first human pair, the first man and 
woman, icere created by God — not slowly metamorphosed 
in the course of indefinite ages out of pre-existing 
animals, but brought into being by a special, distinct, 
and immediate act of the Creator. Thus we read : 
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after 
our likeness : So God created man in his own image, in 
the image of God created He him; male and female 
created He them. And God blessed them, and said 
unto them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the 
earth, and subdue it." Such is the Bible record of the 
origin of the human race ; from this single pair, Adam 
and Eve, it declares has descended the whole world's 
population. 

Scripture, moreover, without figure, or parable, or 
allegory, plainly teaches that by disobedience to the 
Divine command these, the original heads of the human 
family, sinned and fell, and that through their fall the 
character of all their descendants, like their own, has 
been affected in a dreadful manner for evil, so that, 
without exception, they have become heirs of depravity, 
suffering, and death. "By one man sin entered into the 



*Foot Prints of the Creator, pp. 38, 39. 



1 (3 8 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

world, and death by sin." " In Adam all die." Thus 
the entire doctrine of depravity, with all its sad fruits of 
suffering and sorrow and death, is in the Word of God 
identified with the fact that there was a single pair at 
the head of the human race, who were created holy 
and happy, but through transgression forfeited both 
their innocence and bliss, and thereby involved their 
whole posterity in the same ruin. 

Upon this dark and broad fact of man's fall and 
depravity is based the grand and central doctrine of 
revelation — Redemption through Christ. This only ren- 
dered the incarnation and death of the Son of God 
necessary. This is the sole foundation of the whole 
scheme of redeeming grace. The human race accord- 
ing to the plan of Salvation is One — one in origin, 
one in depravity and guilt, one in death and eternal 
doom. And the sacrifice of the Cross was offered 
once for all, in atonement for the sin of the race. 
" Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of 
the world." In redemption, as in the fall, there is one 
Head, each the counterpart of the other. "As in Adam 
all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." 
" Since by man came death, by man came also the 
resurrection of the dead." "As by one man's disobedi- 
ence many were made sinners, so by the obedience of 
one shall many be made righteous." 

Eedemption by Christ pre-supposes our fall into sin, 
and our fall into sin pre-supposes our original righteous- 
ness. These three fundamental facts are inseparable 
in the Word of God, and must stand or fall as one. We 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 169 

see hence how closely related are the doctrines of sin 
through the first created man, and of redemption 
through Christ, the Lord from heaven. These two doc- 
trines taken together compose the warp and the woof, 
the sum and the substance, of the whole Bible. Deny 
one of these and you deny the other ; expunge one of 
them from the sacred volume and you expunge both; 
and take both away, and there will remain of it but the 
empty husk of words without meaning or significance. 

Who, then, but must see that the direct tendency 
of the Theory that would Evolve man by insensible 
degrees from the brute, is to sap the whole foundation 
of the Bible. 

Believing this theory to be irreconcilable alike with 
the testimony of Scripture and the facts of nature — that 
it invalidates the Bible history of creation ; that it con- 
founds the origin of rational and irrational beings, and 
sheds uncertainty and perplexity over their destination ; 
that it saps belief in the immortality of the soul, in the 
accountability of man to God, and in the Christian 
scheme of salvation through J esus Christ — believing this 
we now proceed to lay before the reader the evidences 
and arguments upon which we utterly reject it as a 
fundamental error of the most pernicious and fatal 
tendency. 

We shall speak first of the Theory in its application 
to the origin of species in general, reserving to a separate 
chapter the consideration of the more proximate origin 
and paternity assigned to Man. 



170 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 



I. The Origin of Species. 

The Sacred History of creation teaches us that not 
only the material and the physical arrangements of the 
globe are the work of God, but also that the grass, 
herbs, trees, fishes, whales, reptiles, birds and beasts, and 
man himself, are so many creations of God, originally 
called into existence by special and immediate acts of his 
Almighty Power. The Theory of Evolution maintains 
the contrary, and asserts that all existing organisms 
have been by slow degrees developed out of a few simple 
forms, or perhaps out of one such form only. 

Now this doctrine, this whole conception of " natural 
development," let it be observed at the outset, is but a 
hypothesis — but an imagined scheme — to account for the 
phenomena of animated nature without the intervention 
of Divine Power. It has for its bases, not facts, but 
assumptions; and for its bonds of connection, not reasons, 
but conjectures. It stands to the present hour, notwith- 
standing the Herculean efforts of its able advocates, 
unsupported by anything like clear or conclusive proof. 
It runs counter to the conclusions of natural reason. It 
has failed to gain the assent of men in general. It has 
been refused the support of the leading men in Natural 
Science, beyond a few speculative minds. This Mr. 
Darwin himself is obliged to acknowledge : u Of the older 
and honored chiefs in natural science, many unfortu- 
nately are still opposed to evolution in every form."* 

* Descent of Man, Vol. I., p. 2. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 171 

"Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satis- 
fied with the. view that each species has been indepen- 
dently created."* 

1. If one animal species had produced another, it might 
reasonably be expected that such a thing had been observed 
or known in some age or country of the world. But it has 
not : man has never been a witness of the beginning of a 
new species ; the origin of every species now living ante- 
dates the history and the creation of man. 

It is true that animals vary, that even those descend- 
ing from one and the same parentage vary, and have 
their individual peculiarities ; it is also true that these 
variations or peculiarities are often, more or less dis- 
tinctly, transmitted to their offspring. And it is further 
true, that in this way clearly defined varieties are 
frequently produced, but a distinct species never. These 
variations all take place within certain limits; they 
have never been known to cross the lines of demarkation 
between species and species. 

A few domestic animals, by the constant care of man 
in breeding successively from individuals possessing 
favorable peculiarities, and rearing the offspring under 
shelter and on abundance of good food, are greatly 
changed and improved, and form a marked breed or 
variety. But even these, where human care relaxes or 
is withdrawn, soon begin to relapse and deteriorate ; the 
old lorms return, and the improved character disappears. 
The tame and improved breed of hogs that have often- 



* Origin of Species, p. 428. 

I 



172 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

times been left or lost in the forests of North America, 
and the fine Spanish horses turned loose on the pampas 
of South America, are convincing examples of this. 
The margin of variation has never been known broad 
enough to originate new species; it has, indeed, produced 
varieties or breeds that have sometimes been mistaken 
for species. That any animal organism has produced, 
or can produce, another which differs from itself in any 
essential or truly specific character, is an assumption 
unsupported by any well-established fact. No organism 
is ever seen to exert such power now, and we have satis- 
factory evidence that none have within the whole period 
of human history. It is clear from paintings on Egyptian 
monuments and from the mummies of sacred animals — 
the Bull, the Dog, the Cat, the Ape, the Ichneumon, the 
Crocodile and the Ibis — found in Egyptian tombs, that 
for three thousand years at least, there has been no 
change in certain species. They have retained the same 
general form and even the same specific differences for 
thirty centuries. 

If we say, and the estimate is fair, that cattle and 
horses reproduce their kind once in five years, we have 
since the time of these paintings and mummies six hun- 
dred generations for these animals. Now, if this long 
chain of descents has done nothing — and this is demon- 
strable — toward developing one species from another, 
what grounds have we to suppose that six thousand or 
even sixty thousand generations would effect anything 
toward such a result? Birds and insects reproduce their 
kind every year; in their case, therefore, we have, since 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 173 

the time of the above Egyptian relics, no less than three 
thousand generations ; and if this vast and prolonged 
series, likewise, has done absolutely nothing toward trans- 
forming these creatures into new or other species — why, 
common sense decides that thirty thousand years or 
even thirty million would do just as little, for multiply 
nothing by millions, or by infinity, and it is nothing still. 

Much that seems plausible has been finely said and 
finely written about the principles of "spontaneous 
variation," the "laws of inheritance," and "natural 
selection ; " and all this has been wrought out by active 
and vivid imaginations into a " splendid Theory." But 
let those who say they believe in this theory, point out 
a single clear and unmistakable instance of a new 
species produced in this way. This they have often 
been challenged to produce, but have never been able to 
do. Even Professor Huxley, strongly biased as he is in 
favor of this hypothesis, is compelled to admit that 
"there is no instance in which a group of animals 
having all the characters exhibited by species in nature, 
has ever been originated by selection, whether natural 
or artificial."* And Mr. Darwin himself, indefatigable as 
he has been all his life long in the search, cannot adduce 
as much as one clear and certain example of the kind. 

2. If the theory of development be true, we might not to 
find any bar, certainly not an insuperable bar, to its opera- 
tion set np in Nature itself. But such a bar we do find 
throughout the animal kingdom. 



* Lay Sermons, No. 12. 



174 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

Against the transmutation or commixture of species 
Nature, or rather the God of nature, has established the 
impassable bar of sterility. If a male and female of the 
same species are brought together, 1 they will produce 
offspring of the same kind with themselves ; and if these 
again breed together, the same result will follow ; and if 
this last progeny in like manner come together, they 
will still be fertile and bring forth their like. If animals 
are of the same species, there is no bar to their repro- 
ductive capacities, no matter how widely they may 
differ as breeds or varieties. Two animals of the horse 
species, as dissimilar in size, color and appearance as the 
little black Shetland pony and the tall white Yemen 
Arabian, will breed together, and their descendants, how- 
ever inferior, will continue to perpetuate their brood, 
without check or failure. But if members of two dis- 
tinct species, however similar to each other they may 
be, come together to breed, there is a check ; in the vast 
majority of cases the union is fruitless, and even in the 
few cases where such a cross produces offspring, it is 
found that the power of reproduction is withheld from 
this hybrid offspring, they cannot breed together — that 
is, a male and female hybrid can have no offspring, they 
are absolutely barren. Mixture in this way is arrested 
at the end of the first step — tlwre promptly and infallibly 
a bar, a bound is set which none can pass. "The found- 
ing of new forms by the union of different species, even 
when standing in close natural relation to each other, is 
absolutely forbidden by the sentence of sterility which 
Nature pronounces and enforces upon all hybrid off- 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 175 

spring."* This mysterious check is in force among all 
animals without exception. Mules, the hybrids of the 
ass and horse species, cannot perpetuate their kind. 
The offspring of two birds as much alike as the common 
domestic goose and the large Muscovy duck will not 
propagate their species ; the mixture is a hybrid without 
fecundity, and it perishes with the first generation. 

But let it be observed, that even hybridism is not a 
natural, but an artificial result — it is the fruit of human 
interference. Hybridism among animals in a state of 
nature is unknown. " There are no less than 288 wild 
species of the pigeon family; yet, although some of these 
approach very near to others in their characters, they 
will not, so far as experiments have yet been made, pair 
together." f There are no less than four hundred species 
of humming-birds, and many of these are in all respects 
so similar that none but the practised student can dis- 
tinguish them ; yet a case of mixture or hybridism be- 
tween any two species, however nearly allied, has never 
been seen. This is Mr. Gould's testimony : " I mention 
this fact," he says, " to show that what we designate a 
Species has really distinctive and constant characters ; 
and in the whole of my experience, with many thou- 
sands of Humming Birds passing through my hands, I 
have never observed an instance of any variation which 
would lead me to suppose that it was the result of a 
union of two species. I write this without bias, one way 
or the other, as to the question of the Origin of Species. 



* Argyll's Primeval Man, p. 39. 

f Lyell's Prin. of GcoZ., Vol. II., p. 307. 



176 THE ORY OF E VOL UTIOJST. 

I am desirous of representing nature in her wonderful 
ways as she presents herself to my attention at the 
close of my work, after a period of twelve years of 
incessant labor, and not less than twenty years of in- 
teresting study." * 

This natural bar established by Nature between species 
and species is " a sore let and hindrance " in the way of 
the development hypothesis, but which it can neither 
explain, nor imitate, nor do away with. The most 
ardent advocates of the Scheme are obliged to acknowl- 
edge that all their experiments in breeding, in crossing 
and recrossing, have never been able to produce any 
approximation to it. " There is one set of peculiarities," 
says Huxley, " which the theory of selective modifica- 
tion, as it stands at present, is not wholly competent to 
explain. Here are the phenomena of hybridism staring 
you in the face, and you cannot say, ' I can by selective 
modification produce the same results/ It is admitted 
on all hands, that it has not been found possible to 
produce this complete physical divergence by selective 
breeding." f 

Here, then, stands the unyielding Law of Hybridity 
square across the track of the Theory of Development. 
It presents a perplexity. The Engineer-in-Chief surveys 
it with feverish anxiety — he walks round it, and contem- 
plates it from every point of view — but there it remains 
a stubborn fact — it cannot be placed on board and taken 
along — it cannot be thrust out of the way on this side 



* Gould's Trochihdcc, as quoted by Argyll, 
f Huxley's Origin of Species, pp. 140, 141. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 177 

or on that — neither can it be sunk and buried out of 
sight. At length patience, like natural variation, finds 
its limits, and lo ! we hear him speak vexedly with his 
lips — "To grant to species the special power of producing 
hybrids, and then to stop their further propagation by 
different degrees of sterility, not strictly related to the 
facility of the first union between their parents, seems 
a strange arrangement!"* — But strange as it maybe, 
the arrangement has been made, and its universal opera- 
tion must be acknowledged to be evidence, clear and 
strong, in proof of the stability of species, and conse- 
quently, in refutation of the theory of development by 
unlimited variability. Whenever a new species has come 
into being, or begun to be, we may be sure some power 
has been in operation not included "in the ordinary 
course of nature." 

3. If the Development Theory be true, there must have 
been a series of forms graduating insensibly from the pri- 
mary creature, zohatever that was, to each distinct hind of 
animal now living ; and these being so many and various, 
it might reasonably be expected that its able and zealous ad- 
vocates had discovered more or less of these series or chains 
of descent. But they have found none — no, not one. 

"As all living forms of life," says Mr. Darwin, " are 
the lineal descendants of those which lived long before 
the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the or- 
dinary succession by generation has never once been 
broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole 



* Darwin's Origin of Species, p. 245. 

12 



178 THEORY OF EVOLUTION 

world."* Now, if these chains of lineal descent have 
been or can be traced backward, or if clear evidence of 
their having existed has been or can be traced in the 
fossil records of the earth's crust, it must be accepted as 
strong evidence in support of the doctrine of evolution. * 
But has this been done ? Can Darwin, or Huxley, or 
any other believer in this hypothesis point them out 
to us? Can they unmistakably and without a break 
follow any of them ? Out of the thousands and millions 
which, according to their theory, must exist, can they 
trace out as much as one, great or small, belonging to 
sea or land, in this or any other quarter of the globe ? 
No, not even one. 

How is this desideratum accounted for ? What have 
the supporters of the theory to say in view of this ex- 
traordinary fact ? They say, " The discovery of fossil 
remains has been an extremely slow and fortuitous pro- 
cess." But this is a mere evasion of the difficulty. The 
search for these, fortuitous as it may be, is not as "for a 
needle in a hay-mow." The organisms that have lived 
and died on the earth have been so numerous, that these 
lines of lineal descent must pierce down through the 
rocky formations of the past thick as stand the straws 
of wheat in the harvest field. Admitting that multi- 
tudes of them have faded out of existence, and left no 
visible trace behind, yet other multitudes must have left 
remains that were capable of being preserved, and, like 
the fossils actually found, must have been preserved in 



* Origin of Species, p. 428. 



THE OR Y OP E VOL UTION. 179 

great numbers, if they ever existed. Of these long lines 
of closely graded fossils, running back from all the living 
species to the low and simple forms from which they 
have descended — have none of them been discovered? 
none of them been stumbled upon? Numerous and 
diversified and universally strewn, as Mr. Darwin is con- 
fident they have been, a few of them at least ought to 
have been found and traced out by this time. 

" The record," we are again reminded, " has been but 
very imperfectly read thus far." Be it so ; but has not as 
much as one line been yet read or spelled through? Every 
desirable aid and facility for this end have been afforded. 
Nature herself has laid open her records before us, even 
from their earliest dates. In every clime and region, the 
strata of the earth is found heaved and ruptured, so that 
often the geologist, in travelling a few miles in distance 
across these broken layers, passes over ages and cycles 
of ages in time. Earthquakes have split open mountains 
to their bases, and thrust up islands from the bottom of 
the seas. Rivers, too, have scooped out for themselves 
lengthy channels, vast canons, hundreds and even thou- 
sands of feet deep, through the solid rocks. Tides, also, 
have washed and sifted the crumbling ledges and soil 
along the shores for thousands and tens-of-thousands of 
miles. Add to all this what has been done by the labor 
of man — mines have been worked far and deep, plains 
have been excavated for canals, valleys have been filled 
and hills have been pierced for railroads, in every direc- 
tion, over all Europe and America, for the last half a 
century. And through this whole period, geologists in 



180 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

great numbers, from every nation in both continents, 
have been exploring these strata and chasms and shores 
and excavations with keen and scrutinizing eyes. In 
short, " sea and land and air, all around the world, have 
been vexed by their curious inquiries." And what has 
been the result ? With all these facilities proffered by 
nature and art, and after all this labor and investigation 
and study, not one complete line of lineal descent has 
been traced — out of the more than forty thousand dif- 
ferent species of fossil remains collected, not a single 
chain, or even any considerable part of a chain, can be 
constructed. The utmost that has been accomplished 
has been to link together a few varieties of the same 
species. Between species and species, order and order, 
in every direction, among the living and among the 
dead, there have been found breaks, which no known 
form or forms can span. Along every line run in this 
search by the most ingenious engineers of evolution we 
find a succession of gaps, and many of them gaps so wide 
and deep as to forbid the idea that a connecting chain 
ever stretched across them. 

And what imparts striking significance to this fact is, 
that often transitional or connecting forms are utterly 
wanting where we might most naturally expect to find 
them. No connecting links between molluscan and ver- 
tebrate fish have ever been discovered. No forms slowly 
graduating from reptiles into birds have ever been 
brought to light: "Those remarkable fossil reptiles, 
the Ichthyosauria and Plesiosauria, extended, through 
the secondary period, probably over the greater part of 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 181 

the globe ; yet no single transitional form has yet been 
met with, in spite of the multitudinous individuals pre- 
served." * The same is true of the Cetacea or whale 
group; no relic of an incipient stage, or half-way de- 
veloped form, has been anywhere detected. The Che- 
Ionian order — the tortoises, turtles and terrapins — is 
another instance of an extreme form without any transi- 
tional stages as yet known. Again, Batrachians — frogs 
and toads — so far as known, have no link to connect 
them to the Eft group on the one hand, or to the reptiles 
on the other. 

The only instance, says the author last quoted, in 
which an approach towards a series of nearly related 
forms has been obtained is the existing Horse, its prede- 
cessor Hipparion, and other extinct forms. But even 
here there is no proof whatever of modification by minute 
and infinitesimal steps ; a fortiori no approach to a proof 
of modification by " natural selection," acting upon in- 
definite fortuitous variations. "These extinct forms," 
says Professor Owen, " differ from each other in a greater 
degree than do the Horse, the Zebra, and the Ass, which 
are not only good zoological species as to form, but are 
species physiologically, i. e., they cannot produce a race 
of hybrids fertile inter seT f 

To what has been presented under this argument, we 
may add the testimony of one who stands among the 
foremost of living geologists, Professor Dana, of Yale 
College : " Species have not been made out of species 

* Mivart's Genesis of Species, p. 146. 

t Anatomy of Vetebrates, Vol. III., p. 792. 



] 8 2 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

by any process of growth or development, for the transi- 
tion forms do not occur ; the evolution or plan of pro- 
gress was by successive creations of species, in their full 
perfection. The types are wholly independent, and are 
not connected lineally, either historically or zoologically. 
The earliest species of a class were often far from the 
very lowest, although among the inferior. In many 
cases the original or earliest group was but little inferior 
to those of later date, and the progress was toward a 
purer expression of the- type. But geology declares, 
unequivocally, that the new forms were new expressions, 
under the type-idea, by treated material forms, and not 
by forms educed or developed from one another." 

" The evidence of Geology, to-day," says Professor Le 
Conte, " is that species seem to come in suddenly and in 
full perfection, remain substantially unchanged during 
the term of their existence, and pass away in full per- 
fection. Other species take their place apparently by 
substitution, not by transmutation* * 

4. If the Development Theory he true, no animals of high 
and complicated organization should be found introduced 
suddenly, or at once, upon the scene, but by slow and in- 
sensible degrees : as there ought to be no organic chasms, 
so there ought to be no organic leaps ; for, according to this 
hypothesis, none ever occurred. But we discover both. 

We shall find that the scheme harmonizes as little in 
this respect with the revelations of geology as it did in 
the preceding. A great number both of vegetable and 



* Beligion and Science, p. 22. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 133 

animal organizations, of high grades, appear abruptly, 
and some of them with startling suddenness, upon the 
surface of our planet — "with no finely graded antece- 
dents by the aid of which they might have crept up to 
their high places. Huge ferns such as are now nowhere 
seen ; huge pines, stout and lofty as any that dominate 
Norwegian forests, appeared suddenly — with nothing be- 
tween them and sea-weeds, not even the mosses. Huge 
cephalopods, with shells twelve or fifteen feet long, and 
of the very highest mollusc structure, appeared suddenly 
— with nothing between them and nothing. Huge 
sharks and Ganoids, over twenty feet long, and of the 
very highest type of fish structure — with great organic 
blanks just behind them — began the Age of Fishes. 
Huge reptiles from thirty to sixty feet long, and of the 
very highest reptile structure — with great organic blanks 
just behind them — began the Age of Reptiles. Huge 
land-animals, as the Megatheres and Deinotheres and 
Mastodons, to some of which our largest modern quad- 
rupeds are mere pigmies ; huge sea-mammals, as the Zeug- 
lodons, seventy feet long — all with great organic blanks 
just back of them — began the Age of Mammals. All of 
these came upon the scene with extreme abruptness ; as 
if evoked by the stroke of a magician's wand. 

" Now the Development Scheme does not object to 
huge and high-graded organisms, but it does object, and 
that most strenuously, to their occurring by huge leaps. 
It makes oath that they cannot do so. Lower species 
of the same group must precede them. They must reach 
their pinnacle by climbing slowly along finely graduated 



184 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

precursors of less dignity. There can be no great chasm 
as to size or grade of structure between them and 
the most similar of preceding organisms. You see how 
such a notion flies in the face of facts. These fossil 
giants just mentioned — all of them — crowd up hard 
against general exterminations. All of them have the 
next lower species of their respective groups after them 
in time, or at the most with them ; never just before 
them. A great gulf yawns between them and their 
nearest kindred of the preceding formation— alwaj^s as 
to size, often as to grade of structure, and sometimes as 
to both. The lower steps of the necessary flight are 
before the climbers, instead of just behind them. There 
is a sort of broken stairs to come down on, but none 
whatever to go up on. And this not in a single instance 
merely. It is the habit of the geologic Ages." * 

The supporters of the Development hypothesis feel 
and own this difficulty, but seek to escape from it by 
pleading that the geological record is imperfect, or at 
any rate has been but imperfectly read. Much, it must 
be acknowledged, remains to be investigated, and much 
too that will ever remain hard to decipher ; still, " as Sir 
Roderick Murchison has long ago proved, there are 
parts of that record which are singularly complete, 
and in those parts we have the proofs of Creation with- 
out any indication of Development. The Silurian rocks, 
as regards Oceanic Life, are perfect and abundant in the 
forms they have preserved, yet there are no Fish. The 



* Pater Mundi, Second Series, p. 118. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 185 

Devonian Age followed, tranquilly, and without a break ; 
and in the Devonian Sea, suddenly, Fish appear — appear 
in shoals, and in forms of the highest and most perfect 
type. There is no trace of links or transitional forms 
between the great class of Mollusca and the great class 
of Fishes. There is no reason whatever to suppose that 
such forms, if they had existed, can have been destroyed 
in deposits which have preserved in wonderful perfection 
the minutest organisms."* 

5. If the Evolution Hypothesis be true, then as ice travel 
bach in time and approach the commencement of the pro- 
cess of development, i. e., as ice descend through the Qua- 
terniary, Tertiary, Secondary and Primary formations, 
animal structures should grow more and more simple, 
higher organisms should insensibly fade into loicer, until 
at length noth ing is left but mere embryos and foetuses, 
floating larvoe, or sessile cells, in the tepid shallows of ■ 
primeval seas; for, from such, it is asserted, all have come. 

Again the question comes back to us, Are these 
things so? Let us step with the geologist into his 
chariot, and go and see for ourselves. Let us travel 
with him back toward the night of ancient chaos ; and, 
that the result of our tour of observation may be fair and 
reliable, our journey shall be measured, not by centuries 
or milleniums, but by millions of years. Our way lies 
downward through the vast formations of the earth's 
crust. Bidding adieu to the green surface and the living 
scenes around us, we start on our descending course. 



* Argyll's Primeval Man, p. 45. 



186 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

The first step takes us past every trace of man and 
of man's works, and the next beyond the limits of all 
historic time. Reaching the great geological division of 
rocks called the Tertiary, we pass through formation 
after formation, composed of sand, clay and lime, which 
together amount to a thickness of more than three 
thousand feet. As we descend through this long and 
diversified series of strata an age flies past at every step 
we take. We are on a roacl where the lapse of time is 
marked, not by a succession of seasons or of years, but 
by the coming and departure of repeated creations 
— by the slow excavation by water of deep channels 
and broad valleys in rocks of marble — by the gradual 
upheaval of ocean beds into mountain chains and 
continents — and by the insensible subsidence of other 
mountains and continents to the bosom of the deep, 
in which ages upon ages before they had been slowly 
formed. At length we are nearing the nether bounds 
of this great division of the earth's crust. All along 
our downward road, the animal population of the globe 
has been rapidly changing — strange, and yet stranger 
forms arresting our gaze at every stage. We have seen 
in foreign shapes sluggish elephants and mastodons and 
rhinoceroses, gigantic elks and fleet hipparions, browsing 
amid forest growths as strange to us as if we had 
alighted on the circumference of another planet. We 
have passed the family of the great and terrible Dino- 
therium, reposing in unconscious sleep amid the flitting 
of bats, the pranks of monkeys, and the hootings of 
nightly owls. We have noticed the depths of the sea 



Animals. 



Age 
of 
Man 
and 
Mammals. 



Age 
of 
Keptih 



Age 
of 

Amphibians 
and 
Fishes, 



Age 
of 

Moluscs, 
Corals 
and 
Crustaceans. 



Eock Formations. 




oooooooo o o o o 

o o o o o o ° ° ° oo o 

o o o o O O g"? L ?0 o o 

OOP OooOq q qo r» 







- _~ _ 




% UPPER LUDLOW ROCK 




Waymestrey LIMESTONE 




WdOWER LUDLOW ROCK 




j WENLOCK limestone 




W&iSHAL£ 




^-STZZr-tCARODA CSSAWSTONEt 





LANDE/LO FLAGS, 



Plants. 



Age 
of 

Angio-sperms 
and 
Palms. 



Age 
of 
Cycads 

and 
Pines. 



Age 
of 

Acrogens 
and 
Gymnosperms. 



Age 
of 
Algae. 



188 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

foaming with the gambols of whales and dolphins and 
its shores glitter with shells of pearly white and beau- 
teous forms. We have looked down upon flocks of 
the harmless palaeotherium and of the agile xiphodon 
grazing peacefully in their luxuriant valleys. And at 
our present standing, on the utmost confines of the vast 
Tertiary, we see the lakes deeply plowed by huge 
pelicans and unwieldy turtles ; snipes retreating among 
the reeds, and sea-gulls waddling upon the sands; 
gigantic buzzards hovering in the air watching their 
prey, while crocodiles draw their hideous forms through 
the marshy grasses. — And now our question is, Do these 
immensely remote and ancient scenes exhibit anything 
that may be construed into a confirmation of the 
development hypothesis? We must answer, No. We 
can discover nothing like a decline or a fading away 
of complex animal structures toward those that are 
simpler and lower. Here are beasts and reptiles and 
birds and fishes in all respects as highly organized as 
those we left alive on the surface of the globe as we 
started upon our journey. We can detect not a shade 
of difference, and, therefore, can find not a shadow of 
support for the theory. The point being so obvious, 
further observations here are unnecessary. 

We remount our chariot and advance on our down- 
ward way. The next great geological division, the 
Secondary, opens before us with the Cretaceous or 
Chalk formation — a stratification of more than two thou- 
sand feet in thickness, and which was built up for the 
most part by slow sedimentary deposition at the bottom 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 189 

of the sea. In passing through this immense cretaceous 
bed, therefore, we traverse a period of time that is over- 
whelming to contemplate. And through it all, how 
different, how strange the aspect of our globe as 
compared with what it now is. At this epoch, not one 
of the present great physical features of the earth was 
in existence — our vast mountain ranges, the Pyrenees, 
the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Andes had not yet 
been elevated above the even surface of the deep. The 
cretaceous sea flowed unruffled over the sites of Sinai 
and Lebanon and Ararat, while at its bottom was 
slowly accumulating the sedime 4 nt, which after untold 
periods was to constitute the soil of Eden, and to enrich 
the vales and hills of God's Promised Land. But we 
must not linger here — continuing our descent, we next 
pass through the vast J urassic system of more than a 
mile in thickness, whose multitudinous and varying 
strata testify of ages and cycles of ages occupied in its 
formation, which it is not in the power of man to com- 
pute or estimate. — Having now, then, reached an epoch 
that is all but immeasurably distant, let us halt again to 
test our Theory of Development. Are animal organisms 
7wre generally of a low and simple grade ? Have they 
one with another declined and deteriorated as we have 
travelled backward in time ? We find, indeed, very 
different animals ; but different, not by insensible varia- 
tion, but by distinct and clearly defined steps, as by 
separate creations. We discover no evidence, no indica- 
tion whatever of living forms fading away toward the 
simplicity of worms or tadpoles. On the contrary, 



190 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

throughout the chalk formation we find the remains of 
animals of high and complicated organization. Though 
much of present Europe and America were at this time 
sleeping beneath the still waters of the Cretacean Sea, 
yet here are continents and islands clothed w r ith rich 
vegetation, and shaded with groves of trees resembling 




Chalk under the Microscope. 



our palm and oak and walnut. Here are birds wading 
along the shores, and monster reptiles wallowing in the 
marshes. Here are shoals of fishes analogous to our 
pike and salmon fleeing before voracious sharks and dog- 
fishes. Here lived and abounded Belemnites, Ammon- 
ites, Turrilites, and other cephalopoda, larger, more 



THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 191 

powerful, and more curiously organized than any Lolig- 
ines or Sepias existing in the present seas. The Beryx 
of the chalk sea in its organism was in no degree or 
respect inferior to the Beryx lineatus of King George's 
Sound to-day. And nothing can be more curious or 
grotesque or beautiful than the coral formations of this 
period. Nay, the whole substance of these chalk rocks, 
as Erhenberg has shown, is made up of minute but 
most elegant forms, those of Foraminifera and other 
Zoophytes. (See preceding cut.) 

In the lower members of this Jurassic System, the 
Wealden and Oolite and Lias Rocks, we find the remains 
of the most complicated and extraordinary creatures 
that ever inhabited our planet. Here we see flying or 
hopping flocks of the indescribably curious Rampho- 
rynchus and Pterodactyl us ; the latter being half-vam- 
pire, half- woodcock, with crocodile's teeth along its 
tapering bill, and scale-armor over its lizard-like body — 
qualified thus for all services and all elements, it has 
been compared by Dr. Buckland to Milton's fiend, that 

" O'er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, 
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, 
And sinks, or swims, or wades, or creeps, or flies." 

In the waters of this period roamed also, single or in 
company, the Plerosaurians, carnivorous reptiles, with 
powerful cylindrical bodies often twenty feet long. These 
had the head of a Lizard, the teeth of a Crocodile, a neck 
of excessive length resembling that of the Swan, the 
ribs of a Chameleon, the paddles of a Whale, and the 
tail of a Quadruped — yet for all this, presenting " a beau- 



1 92 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

tiful example of the adaptation of structure to the pecu- 
liar exigencies of species." In the same waters lived the 
Ichthyosaurus, another reptile monster of gigantic pro- 
portions, often attaining the extraordinary length of 
thirty feet. It possessed the snout of a Porpoise, the 
head of a Lizard, the jaws and teeth of a Crocodile, the 
vertebrae of a Fish, the sternum of the Ornithorhynchus, 
the paddles of a Whale, and the trunk and tail of a 
Quadruped. The jaws often opened to the extent of a 
fathom, and were armed with one hundred and sixty 
teeth. Its paddles were constructed of more than a 
hundred octagonal bones, all most admirably connected 
together. Its organs of vision possessed the most re- 
markable peculiarities, and were of colossal dimensions, 
the eyeball sometimes being equal to a twelve-inch 
globe. " Before the orbit of the eye there existed a cir- 
cular series of thin bony plates, which surrounded the 
opening of the pupil. This apparatus, which is met with 
in the eyes of some birds, and in those of the turtle and 
lizard, could be used so as to increase or diminish the 
curvature of the transparent cornea, and thus increase 
or diminish the magnifying power, according to the 
requirements of the animal ; performing the office, in 
short, of a telescope or microscope at pleasure. The 
eyes of the Ichthyosaurus were thus an optical apparatus 
of wonderful power and of singular perfection. They 
gave the animal the power of seeing its prey far and near, 
and of pursuing it in the darkness, and in the depths of 
the sea. The curious arrangement of bony plates we 
have described furnished, besides, to its vast globular eye, 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 193 

the power necessary to bear the pressure of a considera- 
ble weight of water, as well as the violence of the waves, 
when the animal came to the surface to breathe, and 
raised its head above the waves." * 

Wonderful, indeed, was the aspect of our world at 
this remote epoch. Having a brilliant sun, high tem- 
perature, and copious showers, nothing in the existing 
scenery of the globe surpasses the rich and gorgeous vege- 
tation which decorated the continents of the Jurassic 
period. And wonderful, too, was the population that 
occupied the earth's seas at this time — Pleisiosauri, 
Inguanodons, and Ichthyosauri ploughed the waters in 
every direction, while upon their surface floated innu- 
merable Ammonites in light skiffs, some of them equal 
to a wagon wheel in diameter. Gigantic turtles and 
crocodiles also crawled through the marshes or basked 
upon the banks of lakes and rivers, while flocks of the 
dragon-like Pterodactyls, with their powerful wings and 
reptile bodies, were far and near cleaving the air in 
pursuit of their prey, and swarms of active insects every- 
where darting and glittering in the morning and evening 
sunshine. 

It hardly need be said, that in all this we discover 
nothing like support or countenance to the dream of 
Evolution — nothing, certainly, to indicate that animal 
organisms are declining and fading toward Darwin's 
Ascidians or his Ascidian larvse. 

But peradventure it may be urged, notwithstanding 



* Figuire's World Before the Deluge, p. 195. 

13 



194 THE OR Y OF E VOL UTION. 

our incalculable distance from the light of the present 
day, that we have not yet gone far enough to reach any 
marked evidence of this prior inferiority — so insensibly 
slow has been the progress of development. We resume, 
then, our journey and descending through full half a mile 
of Triassic and Permian formations, without stopping to 
notice either their animal or plantal productions — their 
graceful forests of Green Conifers and Tree-ferns, or their 
huge Labyrinthodons and Land-turtles and marine Croco- 
diles — our subterranean road brings us at length to the 
borders of the Great Coal Measures, which, in layers 
past enumeration, stretch before us to an average thick- 
ness of no less than ten thousand feet. We advance and 
cross it — what scenes ! what productions ! what periods ! 
These coal strata, built entirely of the spoils of successive 
vegetable worlds, with the intervening beds of limestone 
made up wholly of the fossil remains of innumerable 
generations — how they all proclaim the prolonged periods 
occupied in their formation. How countless the ages 
necessary for their accumulation, when the formation of 
only a few inches required the life and death of many 
generations.* Standing here at the base of the Great 
Carboniferous System, and looking upward over its long 
and vanishing series of strata, all slowly built up of 
organized remains, we are filled with awe, and feel that 
we have reached a date that cannot be remote from the 
confines of eternity ! 

We have, indeed, sensibly approached the period when 



* Professor Phillips calculates that, at the ordinary rate of progress, 
it would require 122,400 years to accumulate only sixty feet of coal. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 195 

the earth was a molten mass, for here the internal heat 
of the globe still penetrates its cooling and consolidating 
crust, producing a high temperature, and a steamy 
atmosphere, over its whole surface; from pole to pole 
it has but one climate. The same exuberant vegetation 
abounds within the polar circles as between the tropics ; 
the tall and graceful Sigillarias, the broad-leaved Lepido- 
dendrons, the fluted Calamites, and elegant arborescent 
Ferns, with airy foliage as finely cut as the most delicate 
lace, flourished in Greenland as they did in Guinea, in 
Melville Island as well as in central Africa. Under this 
elevated temperature, of land animals we find no traces, 
except of a few flitting insects. Birds there are none. 
The seas, however, are occupied by an immense num- 
ber of zoophytes and molluscans, and also by some 
crustaceans and Fishes. In the Mountain Limestone, 
the lowest member of this system, we find the Nautili, 
and with them the Goniatites, which are far more curi- 
ously constructed than their representatives in the pres- 
ent seas. But we tarry not here to examine or compare. 

Though we have now passed through one of the most 
surprising periods in our planet's history, and have more 
than doubled the distance of our last halting-place from 
the light of the living, yet, that our observations may 
be complete and conclusive, we must still go forward. 
The mind shrinks, shudders almost, at the thought of 
plunging still deeper into the abyss of the unfathom- 
able past. We have already reached an era of high 
temperature — the heat is become oppressive — the at- 
mosphere is semi-opaque through the abounding exhala- 



196 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

tions arising from the warm earth — the sun is growing 
pale and dim even at his meridian — one shoreless ocean, 
dotted only with scattered islets, covers the whole face 
of the globe. Strange and dismal situation ! Leaving 
behind the last footprint of air-breathing animal, and 
bidding adieu even to the last vestige of land-plants, we 
pass down into the vast Devonian System, whose won- 
drous records make up a volume of not less than two 
miles in thickness. The geological character of this 
immense formation, again, tells of ages innumerable. 
Though more than ten thousand feet in depth, yet the 
whole of it is obviously derived from the materials 
of more ancient rocks, fractured and ground and de- 
composed, and then slowly deposited in the tranquil 
waters of the Devonian Sea. The gradual and quiet 
nature of the process, and therefore of its immense 
duration, are evident from the numerous platforms of 
death, which mark its formation, each crowded with 
organic structures which lived and died where they 
now are seen. 

" The fossils of this great System are remarkably 
numerous, and in a state of high preservation. And cer- 
tainly a stranger assemblage of forms have rarely been 
grouped together; — creatures whose very type is lost, 
fantastic and uncouth, and which puzzle the naturalist 
to assign them even their class ; boat-like animals, fur- 
nished with oars and a rudder; — fish plated over, like the 
tortoise, above and below, with a strong armor of bone, 
and furnished with but one solitary rudderlike fin; 
other fish less equivocal in their form, but with the 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 197 

membranes of their fins- thickly covered with scales; — 
creatures bristling over with thorns; others glistening 
in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully japanned."* 
Here were lobsters of such huge proportions, that an 
ordinary sized lobster of the present day might stretch 
its entire length across its tail-flap ; some of these were 
over four feet long ; yet the shelly armor of this gigantic 




Fishes of the Devonian Epoch. 

I. Coccostens. 2. Pterichthys. 3. Cepfaalagpta. 

crustacean was made up of so many geometrical plates, 
whose jointings and claspings and delicately fretted 
finish are worthy of all admiration, f Here, too, lived 
and roamed fishes of such enormous dimensions, that 
each particular scale that covered their bodies was equal 
in size to a large oyster-shell. % Here abounded many 



* Old Bed Sandstone, p. 30. . f lb., 133. J 16., 153. 



198 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

other strange but highly organized fishes, to a descrip- 
tion of whose complicated and often beautiful structures 
Hugh Miller devotes page after page and chapter after 
chapter with unflagging interest. 

" The fishes of this period," says Professor Dana, " are 
of two groups — the Selachians ox Sharks, and the Ganoids. 
The earliest species, therefore, instead of being the lowest 
of fishes, belong to the highest of the three grand divi- 
sions : moreover instead of being small, some of them 
were twenty or thirty feet long. The Selachians are 
highest among fishes even in modern seas."* Here, 
then, again, the testimony of geology is clear and de- 
cisive against the hypothesis of development — here come 
forth out of their long-sealed graves the inhabitants of 
the ancient Devonian, and stand up before us in their 
odd and fantastic forms, each to bear witness against the 
theory that would exclude the Creator from the world 
He has made, and profanely strip Him of the honor of 
His own works. " The argument is a very simple one," 
says Hugh Miller; "fishes differ very much among 
themselves — some rank nearly as low as worms, some 
nearly as high as reptiles. Now, if fish made their first 
appearance, not in their least perfect, but in their most 
perfect state ; not in their nearest approximation to the 
worm, but in their nearest approximation to the reptile 
— there is no room for progression, and the argument 
falls. Now it is a geological fact, that it is fish of the 
higher orders that appear first on the stage, and that 



* Manual of Geology, Revised Edition, p. 302. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 199 

they are found to occupy exactly the same level during 
the vast period represented by five succeeding forma- 
tions. There is no progression. — The infidel substitutes 
progression for Deity ; Geology robs him of his god." * 

It is obvious, then, that even here, incalculably far as 
we have receded into the depths of the past, we discover 
no instance, no indication, of animal organisms declining 
and fading away into low and simple forms, as the 
Development Theory supposes ; on the contrary, we find 
multitudes of creatures of highly complicated structures, 
and some of them, in all respects, equal to those of their 
class that live in our own day. 

The next formation that lies before us is the great 
Silurian System, Upper and Lower; and to explore 
which, we once more adventure to resume our down- 
ward journey. As we descend the long succession of its 
strata, we are again, as we have repeatedly been before, 
profoundly impressed with the vastness of the periods 
which must have elapsed during its deposition. When 
we think of the slow derivation of this multitude of 
layers from more ancient rocks; of their oft-repeated 
elevation and depression ; of the long periods of repose, 
during which hundreds of animal species ran through 
their cycle of generations, and became extinct; and of the 
continuance of this stratifying process, until these thin 
beds had acquired, by union, the immense thickness of 
full four miles! — when we think of all this, it would 
seem to a creature whose " age is as an handbreadth," 



* Old Bed Sandstone, p. 41. 



200 THE OR Y OF E VOL UTION. 

that it required a duration all but eternal to deposit and 
build up this system alone. As an example of the high 
organizations found in this System of Rocks we here 
give a cut of the Eurypterus. 

Having traversed this stupendous system, and 
reached a date whose distance from the fair face of 
the extant creation is immeasurable, let us again halt 




Eurypterus remipes. 



for review and examination of the fossil inhabitants 
which it entombs. Shall not our Development Theory 
now, if ever, find support and confirmation? In the 
estimation of the more moderate Evolutionists, tiventy- 
five millions of years would scarce suffice to carry us 
back to the base of the Upper Silurian, while it would 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 201 

require millions more, thirty-five millions more, accord- 
ing to Mr. Croll, to bring us to the base of the Lower 
Silurian, where we now stand.* Shall we not here, 
then, if ever, discover decisive evidence of animal 
organizations degenerating and fading away toward the 
simplicity and insignificance of larvae or embryonic 
forms? No; these most ancient Silures reject the 
imputation as promptly and as indignantly as any 
witnesses we have yet met and interrogated. On sur- 
veying these fossils, we are, it is true, forcibly and at 
once struck with the great change which has taken 
place in the inhabitants of the earth, as compared with 
what we found in the period of the Mountain Limestone 
— the change, indeed, is almost total— the population is 
another. But nowhere, among them all, do we detect 
any indication of decline or degradation in structure ; 
nowhere do we discover such an humble exhibition of 
animal forms as the Development Theory would lead us 
to expect. 

".At this ancient epoch," says St. George Mivart, 
" not only were the vertebrate, molluscous, and orthro- 
pod types distinctly and clearly differentiated, but 
highly-developed forms had been produced in each of 
these sub- kingdoms. Thus, in the Vertebrata there 
were fishes not belonging to the lowest but to the very 
highest groups which are known to have ever been 
developed, namely, the Elasmobranchs (the highly- 
organized sharks and rays), and the Ganoids, a group 



* See Genesis of Species, p. 156. 



202 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

for which the sturgeon may stand as a type. Among 
the molluscous animals we have members of the very 
highest known class ; and among articulated animals we 
find Trilobites and Eurypterida, which do not belong 
to any incipient worm -like group, but are distinctly 
differentiated Crustacea of no low form. We have in 
all these animal types nervous systems differentiated 
on distinctly different patterns, fully formed organs of 
circulation, digestion, excretion and generation, com- 
plexly-constructed eyes and other sense organs; in 
short, all the most elaborate and complete animal 
structures built up, and not only once, for in the fishes 
and mollusca we have the coincidence of the indepen- 
dently-developed organs of sense, attaining a nearly 
similar complexity in two quite distinct forms."* 

" While it may be said in a general sense, that lower 
forms have preceded higher ones," said Agassiz in a 
recent lecture, " it is not true that all the earlier animals 
were simpler than the latter. On the contrary, many 
of the lower animals were introduced under more highly 
organized forms than they have ever shown since, and 
have dwindled afterward. Animals that should be 
ancestors, if simplicity of structure is to characterize the 
first born, are known to be of later origin ; the more 
complicated forms have frequently appeared first, and 
the simpler ones later, and this in hundreds of instances. 
The Development assertion does not bear serious exam- 
ination. It is just one of those fancied results following 



* Genesis of Species, pp. 154-156. 



THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 203 

the disclosure or presentation of a great law which 
captivates the mind, and leads it to take that which it 
tvishes to be true for truth."* 

" It is worthy of remark," says Hugh Miller, " that 
the Brachiopods of the Silurian periods, in which the 
group occupied such large space in creation, consisted of 
greatly larger and more important animals than any 
which it contains in the present day."f 

Crustaceans of very curious and complicated forms, 
and in no respect resembling the Trilobites, have been 
discovered in the Silurian Rocks both of England and 
America — the Pterygotus and the Eurypterus — both 
supposed to have been inhabitants of fresh water; 
quarry -men, where they were first found, from the 
winged form and feather-like ornament of their thoracic 
appendages, fancifully named them " Seraphim." 

But we need not multiply illustrations : a single 
instance will sufficiently indicate the high animal organ- 
isms that existed in this primeval epoch — we refer to 
the Trilobite, During the middle and later periods of 
this era, trilobites abounded over every portion of the 
earth's surface ; whole beds of rock were formed almost 
exclusively of their remains. The fossils of no less than 
four hundred different species have been discovered. 
And geologists know no more unique family of animals 
than that of the trilobites, or a family more unlike any 
which now exists. "In their nicely-jointed shells, the 
armorer of the middle ages might have found almost all 

* Lect. XII., before Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, 
t Foot Prints of the Creator, p. 209. 



204 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 



the contrivances of his craft anticipated, with not a few 
besides which he had failed to discover." They varied 
in size from an inch or two to a foot or more in length. 
The head presented, in general, the form of an oval 
buckler, and the body was composed of a series of artic- 
ulations or rings overlapping one another, so that many 
of them could roll themselves up into a ball like a 
hedgehog. Barrande, in his interesting work on T7ie 



A. Trilobite. B. Left eye of a Trilobite magnified. C. A few facets 
of the eye more highly magnified. 

Silurian System of Bohemia, has traced them through 
the various stages of their embryonic development, and 
shown that they underwent metamorphoses to some 
extent similar to certain insects. Their usual mode of 
swimming was upon their backs, and the places they 
chose for their abodes were far from shore, but com- 
monly in shallow water. But the points in these 
creatures upon which we desire to fix special attention 




THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 205 

are the organs of vision, which were compound eyes. 
The discovery of these eyes of trilobites in so perfect 
a state of preservation, after having been buried for 
incalculable ages in the early strata of the earth, is 
one of the most marvellous facts yet disclosed by geo- 
logical researches. And we must regard these organs 
with feelings of no ordinary kind, when we recollect that 
we have before us the identical instruments of vision 
through which the light of heaven was admitted to the 
sensorium of some of the first inhabitants of our planet. 

This very wonderful organ of vision, the Compound 
Eye, is found in many of the insects and crustaceans of 
the present day. On the head of a fly, for example, 
are two large protuberances, one on each side ; these are 
its organs of vision. The whole surface of these promi- 
nences is covered with a multitude of small hemispheres, 
arranged closely and with the utmost regularity. These 
little hemispheres have each of them a minute trans- 
parent convex lens in the middle, each of which has a 
distinct branch of the optic nerve ministering to it ; so 
that the different lenses may be considered as so many 
distinct eyes. Of these eyes, the beetle has on each side 
3180 ; the common house-fly 4000 ; the drone-fly 7000— 
each of which, in all these, is capable of receiving and 
forming a distinct image of any object that may stand or 
lie before it. Leuwenhoek, having adjusted the eye of a 
fly for the purpose, could see distinctly in each of these 
diminutive lenses, though not larger than the point of 
the finest needle, the whole steeple of a church, which 
was 2 ( J9 feet high, and 750 feet distant; and then 



206 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

turning it toward a neighboring house, saw through 
many of these little hemispheres, not only the front of 
the house, but also the doors and windows, and could 
discern distinctly whether the windows were open or 
shut ! Such a piece of mechanism transcends all com- 
prehension, and is to be reckoned among the highest and 
most marvellous of animal organs. — Yet, we find this 
very organ in all its complexity, beauty and efficiency 
in the trilobites of the dim and immeasurably remote 
Silurian Epoch. 

The form of each eye in the trilobite was that of the 
frustum of a cone, or of a circular pyramid with the 
point cut off. On these circular and tapering promi- 
nences were ranged compactly and with the utmost 
regularity the little facets or lenses, for three-fourths of 
their circumference; so that where the distinct vision 
of one eye ceased, that of the other began, and their 
combined range swept the entire horizon. The number 
of these lenses in different species varied from four hun- 
dred to six thousand, in each eye.— Now, when we find 
organs of such high complexity and perfection as these, 
organs as complex and perfect as any now living ; and 
find them, not in few or rare instances, but overspread- 
ing the globe, and that at the period, so far as man has 
been able to discover, which marked the dawn of animal 
existence on our planet — how clear the voice, and how 
decisive the testimony of such a fact against the De- 
velopment idea, that as we travel back in time and 
approach the commencement of things, animal structures 
must grow more and more simple, higher organisms must 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 207 

insensibly fade into lower, until at length nothing is 
left but the merest embryos of life. We have travelled 
backward by millions of years, and millions of ages, and 
now stand at the base of the Great Silurian System, 
hard by " the foundations of the earth," and behold even 
here the perfection of animal mechanism — Eyes as com- 
plex and curious, as beautiful and efficient, as any that 
rejoice in the sunshine of to-day ! 

Professor Buckland, of Oxford University, speaking of 
the trilobite eye, says : " We do not find this instrument 
passing onwards, as it were, through a series of experi- 
mental changes, from more simple into more complex 
forms ; it was created at the very first, in the fulness of 
perfect adaptation to the uses and condition of the class 
of creatures, to which this kind of eye has ever been, 
and is still appropriate."* 

Having descended through the varied and numberless 
strata of the four great divisions of the earth's crust, and 
successively surveyed their fossil inhabitants till we have 
reached a point where all certain traces of organized 
existences vanish, we may now retrace our steps and 
come back to the land and light of the living ; and we 
do so with the full conviction that in all we have seen 
and examined, there is nothing that can with fairness 
be construed into a support or countenance of the theory 
of gradual development ; on the contrary, platform after 
platform of animal remains, throughout our whole de- 
scent, has clearly proclaimed the Hand and Counsel of 



* Bridgexcuter Treatise, Vol. VI., p. 304. 



208 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

the Creator to have been concerned in its production, 
even to the very last we have noticed. 

6. If the Darwinian Theory be true, ive ought no* to 
find any animal forms continuing fixed and unchanged 
from age to age, and epoch to epoch ; but all in a process 
of variation, more or less rapid, but ceaseless. The very 
foundation of this hypothesis is, that all living organisms 
are subject to variation arising from the inheritance of 
less or more of the peculiarities of two distinct parents ; 
from the scarcity or abundance of food ; from the heat 
or cold, dryness or dampness of climate ; from the use 
or disuse of certain members ; from spontaneous differ- 
ences, and accidental deformities. These various causes, 
it is said, being in operation through all time and in all 
regions, every organism and type of organism must be 
in an unceasing process of change. 

Now, is this found to be the fact? Is the theory 
sustained and confirmed in this particular by the revela- 
tions of geology ? We again say, No, — and support our 
answer by quotations on the point from an authority 
that none will suspect of being biased against Mr. Dar- 
win or against his theory. " There are some groups of 
animals and plants," says Professor Huxley, "in the 
fossil world, which have been said to belong to ' persist- 
ent types,' because they have persisted, with very little 
change, indeed, through a very great range of time, while 
everything about them has changed largely. There are 
families of fishes whose type of construction has persisted 
all the way from the carboniferous rock right up to the 
cretaceous ; and others which have lasted through almost 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 209 

the whole range of the secondary rocks, and from the 
Lias to the older tertiaries. It is something stupendous 
this — to consider a genus lasting without essential modi- 
fications through all this enormous lapse of time while 
almost everything else was changed and modified."* 
The same authority tells us that some few animals that 
flourished in the remote epoch of the Chalk Formation 
have come down across all the ages of ages that have 
since elapsed so identical and unchanged as u not to be 
even distinguishable from living species. The globigerena 
of that period is not different from that of the present 
day ; and the same may be said of many other Forami- 
nifera. The Snake's head Lamp-shell {Terebratulina 
caput Serpentis), which lives in our English seas, 
abounded in the Chalk Seas." -\ 

" The Shark of the Devonian and Carboniferous forma- 
tions differs no more from existing Sharks than these do 
from one another." J 

" The highest living group of reptiles, the Crocodile, 
is represented at the early part of the Mesozoic epoch, 
by species identical in the essential characters of their 
organization with those now living." J 

Principal Dawson tells us, with regard to Mollusks 
existing in a sub-fossil state in the Post-pliocene days of 
Canada, that " after carefully studying about one hun- 
dred species, and of some of these, many hundreds of 
specimens, I have arrived at the conclusion that they 
are absolutely unchanged." "Here again," he adds, "we 

* Huxley's Origin of Sjiecies, p. 139. 

f Lay Sermons, No. IX. J lb., No. X. 

14 



210 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

have an absolute refusal, on the part of all these animals, 
to admit that they are derived, or have tended to sport 
into new species." Again he says, "Pictet catalogues 
ninety-eight species of mammals which inhabited Europe 
in the Post-glacial period. Of these fifty-seven still exist 
unchanged, and the remainder have disappeared. Not 
one can be shown to have been modified into a new 
form, though some of them have been obliged, by 
changes of temperature and other conditions, to remove 
into distant, and now widely separated regions."* 

Now, if we regard species as distinct creations, consti- 
tuted with fixed limits of variation, the persistency of 
these animals in the same types and forms presents no 
difficulty ; but how are such facts to be accounted for on 
the Development Hypothesis? How came these "per- 
sistent creatures" to escape all the laws of variation, all 
the modifying causes, which, we are told, changed all 
others, and advanced larvae, into fishes, fishes into rep- 
tiles, and reptiles into birds and mammals? By what 
dispensation, according to this theory, has any one 
species continued from the incalculably remote Devonian 
or Carboniferous period to the present time so entirely 
unchanged, "as not to be even distinguished from living 
species?" Up to a certain point, these lines of animals, 
like others, we are informed, had been moulded by the 
laws of variation ; for on this hypothesis, certain primi- 
tive creatures, whatever they were, continued to vary 
and grow and advance until they were developed into 
sharks and crocodiles ; now what happened, what power 



* The Story of Earth and Man, pp. 357,358. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 211 

interposed just at the date when they reached these 
forms and characters, to prevent any further variation, 
so that they remain the same unto this day? How has 
it come to pass, that neither through inheritance, though 
they have passed through myriads of generations; nor 
through food, though this must have varied both in 
quality and quantity ten thousand times in the course 
of these vast periods; nor through climate, though this 
has undergone repeated and extreme changes from 
tropical heat to glacial coldness, and again from glacial 
coldness to our own genial temperature — how has it come 
to pass, we ask, that through none nor all of these have 
this shark and this crocodile been changed, when, as is 
claimed, these influences have been powerfully at work 
on all others around them? If the Development Hypoth- 
esis be true, it must be in harmony with and explanatory 
of all the facts of nature — for a partial theory cannot be 
accepted, because a partial theory cannot be true. But 
not only does the Darwinian Theory fail to account for 
such facts as these, but the very principles on which it 
is based and built, we see, are irreconcilable with them. 
What shall we then say to these things ? Have those 
potent deities of Mr. Darwin, "insensible variation" and 
"natural selection," failed to make anything better, or 
anything different out of these incorrigible creatures? 
They certainly have had sufficient time, and a fair oppor- 
tunity — but to admit their impotency here is to abandon 
the theory, for it proceeds on the assertion that " these 
suffice for the work."* 



* Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol. II., p. 192. 



212 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

From the large and general classes of facts which 
have been adduced under the four preceding proposi- 
tions, we hold that we are fully warranted in the 
conclusion, that the revelations of geology not only 
refuse support, but offer a complete refutation to the 
theory of development. They stand forth as so many 
" stubborn facts," witnessing against it, and refusing to 
yield to its claims or to countenance its pretensions. It 
is not science, but speculation, for it is not based upon 
ascertained facts. Guesses at what has happened, con- 
jectures of what may exist, assumptions of what will be 
discovered, together with inferences drawn from such 
hypothetical premises, are the staple materials out of 
which Mr. Darwin's arguments are largely fabricated. 
It is mainly by probabilities, fancies, analogies, odds and 
ends of truth and error, dexterously woven together, 
that even the appearance of consistency and a seeming 
plausibility have been given to his theory. This " the 
older and honored chiefs in natural science" readily 
perceive, and refuse to accept it— nay, "they are opposed 
to evolution in all its forms." " Were all the anatomists 
of the earth against us," says Professor Sedgewick, " we 
should not one jot abate our confidence. For we have 
examined the old records ; but not in cabinets where 
things of a different age are put side by side, and so 
viewed, might suggest some glimmering notions of a 
false historical connection. We have seen them in spots 
where Nature placed them, and we know their true 
historical meaning. We have visited in succession the 
tombs and charnel-houses of these old times, and we 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 213 

took with us the clue spun in the fabric of development ; 
but we found this clue no guide through these ancient 
labyrinths, and, sorely against our will, we were com- 
pelled to snap its thread; and we now dare to affirm 
with all the confidence of assured truth, that Geology 
— not seen through mists of any theory, but taken as a 
plain succession of monuments and facts — offers one firm 
cumulative argument against the hypothesis of develop- 
ment" 

7. If the theory of Development be true, and the earth 
has been peopled ivith all its varieties of living creatures by 
u fortuitous variations" we ought to discover in Nature 
nothing like a general plan, nothing like a system of animal 
types, nothing like symmetry of organization, nothing like 
order as to age, strength or stature — for plan, system, sym- 
metry and order cannot proceed from accident or fortuity. 

If no designing and creating Intelligence has been 
concerned in peopling the world — if it owes all its differ- 
ing living tenants to accidental accretions or fortuitous 
variations, we could look for nothing but universal dis- 
order and confusion; we should find no distinction of 
classes, genera, or species, but all animals grading and 
fading into one another into countless and undistinguish- 
able varieties, without any certain limits of form, size, 
strength, or longevity. 

If "fortuity," and not Intelligence, has been the 
moulding divinity of animated nature, we might reason- 
ably expect to meet in living creatures with all manner 
of excesses and deficiencies, all kinds of misplaced and 
mispaired members — some with fewer limbs than they 



214 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. ' 

needed, and some with more than they could use ; some 
with legs on one side twice the length of those on the 
other ; some with eyes implanted in the back of their 
heads instead of in the front ; birds with a wing on one 
side and a claw on the other; sheep clothed in the bristles 
of hogs, and hogs warbling the songs of nightingales; 
hands encased in hoofs, and feet divided into fingers ; 
fingers without joints, and legs without bones — and ten 
thousand other similar and dissimilar malformations. 

If "accidental variations/* and not creative Intelli- 
gence, has called into existence the living tenants of our 
globe, we might also reasonably expect to meet with all 
manner of irregularities as to age, stature and disposition 
— some sheep in a flock reaching maturity in three 
years, while others required three-score years ; cattle in 
one generation never rising above the size of calves, in 
another growing and reaching the magnitude of ele- 
phants; horses in this country passing through the 
entire round of their existence, like insects, within a 
single season, and in that country prolonging their 
usefulness through a whole century; the peck of a 
canary now proving poisonous as the fang of a viper, 
and now the disposition of the lamb turning out fero- 
cious as that of a hyena ; here colts and calves growing 
"beautifully less" till they could join the mice in their 
dance, and there crickets and grasshoppers increasing in 
bulk until rivals of the camel and able to clear a hill or a 
grove at a bound ; and men — some growing into gigantic 
Brobdignagians, ten, twelve, or fifteen feet high, others 
remaining such diminutive Liliputians that a whole regi- 
ment of them could be drilled on a dining-table. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 215 

Nay, more than all this — If "insensible and fortui- 
tous variations," and not the Creator's wisdom and 
power, had peopled our planet, we might in reason and 
consistency expect to find its surface traversed by mon- 
sters hideous as ever portrayed by an artist's pencil, or 
conceived by a poet's fancy — plundering Harpies, with 
faces of women and the bodies and wings and claws of 
birds, flitting among the trees — -horrid Centaurs, half 
men and half horses, ranging the mountains and the 
forests — horned and hairy Satyrs, having human bodies 
and goats' legs, grotesquely dancing in their retired dells 
— frightful Minotaurs, hybrids of men and oxen, devour- 
ing youths and maidens as their favorite pasture — 
Arguses fiercely glaring through a hundred different 
eyes — lawless Cyclopes sending sided glances from one 
huge eye-ball in the centre of their foreheads, as they 
skulked back to their villanous caves — two-faced 
Januses, seeing alike before and behind — giant Briar- 
euses, armed for fight with a hundred fists — nine-headed 
Hydras, wading and hissing through the marshes — 
watching Cerberuses, snarling out of fifty throats — 
Cecropses, part men and part serpents, dragging their 
slimy forms over sand and rocks — Mermaids and 
Mermen, with human snouts and fishes' tails, frolicking 
among the waves or gliding through the streams — But it 
is not in the power of imagination to portray or con- 
ceive the confusion and monstrosities, the discords and 
deformities that would fill a world peopled by chance, 
fortuity or accident, as contemplated by the wild theory 
of Development. 



216 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

How widely different from all this is the existing 
creation around us! Nature, through all her realms, 
clearly exhibits the Plans of far-reaching and all- 
comprehending Intelligence — design and adaptation, 
order, harmony and beauty, are everywhere apparent. 
Whether we contemplate the mutual relations and 
dependencies of the earth and the atmosphere, of sea 
and land, or of the vegetable kingdom and the animal, 
we discover each to be a system of admirable means to 
important ends, a system philosophic, complete, ex- 
quisite and beautiful in the highest degree. The more 
extended and thorough our study of the characters, 
habits and wants of animals, whether beasts or birds, 
reptiles or fishes, insects or worms, the more profoundly 
are we impressed with the wisdom and goodness dis- 
played in their several allotments — every one being 
fitted for its habitation, and every habitation suited to 
its given occupants. In all the myriad bundles of living 
machinery enfolded in animal forms, there is not an 
organ, not a feature of construction, wherein human 
wisdom could suggest an improvement, or devise a 
change that would be for the benefit of the individual in 
its particular sphere and line of life. The further our 
researches go into the mechanism and physiology of 
plants and animals, louder and louder grow the calls for 
admiration, and the more and more absurd becomes the 
idea that such a rich and boundless concourse of living 
wonders should be the result of u fortuitous variations !" 

"Nothing is more striking," says Agassiz, "through- 
out the animal and vegetable kingdoms, than the unity 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 217 

of plan in the structure of the most diversified types. 
From pole to pole, in every longitude, mammalia, birds, 
reptiles, and fishes, exhibit one and the same plan of 
structure, involving abstract conceptions of the highest 
order, far transcending the broadest generalizations of 
man, — for it is only after the most laborious investiga- 
tions that man has arrived at an imperfect understand- 
ing of this plan ; and yet this logical connection, these 
beautiful harmonies, this infinite diversity in unity, are 
represented by some as the result of forces exhibiting no 
trace of intelligence, no power of thinking, no faculty of 
combination, no knowledge of time and space. If there 
is anything which places man above all other beings in 
Nature, it is precisely the circumstance that he possesses 
those noble attributes without which, in their most 
exalted excellence and perfection, not one of these traits 
of relationship so characteristic of the great type of the 
animal and vegetable kingdoms can be understood or 
even perceived. How, then, could these relations have 
been devised without similar powers? If all these 
relations are almost beyond the reach of the mental 
powers of man, and if man himself is part and parcel 
of the whole system, how could this system have been 
called into existence if there does not exist One Supreme 
Intelligence as the Author of all things?"* 

8. If we accept the theory of Development, we must 
abandon the guidance of common sense, and renounce the 
decisions of natural reason, for this hypothesis requires us 



* See Essay on Classification, Sections II., IV. 



218 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

to believe that mechanisms the most complicated and 
ingenious in their construction, and the most efficient 
and important in their use, that the human mind ever 
contemplated, are the results of mere haphazard variations, 
or blind chance, or sheer accident. 

The denial of final causes is the distinguishing charac- 
teristic of Mr. Darwin's Theory. He denies design in 
any of the organisms in the animal and in the vegetable 
kingdom, and teaches that even the most complicated 
and marvellous of them all have been formed without 
any object or end in view, but turned out what they 
are by the gradual accumulation of unintended and 
undirected variations of structure and instinct. This is 
Darwinism presented pure and simple and naked. As 
it may seem to some incredible that any intelligent 
man should seriously hold and teach such a doctrine, it 
becomes necessary to give proof that this is his theory. 
This we now offer. 

First, Proof from his own tvritings. This idea pervades 
his works throughout. " Slight individual differences," 
he says, " suffice for the work, and are probably the sole 
differences which are effective in the production of new 
species."* The same sentiment is repeated in his later 
work on Man: "Slight fluctuating differences in the 
individual suffice for the work of Natural Selection."f 
Again : "If it could be demonstrated that any complex 
organism existed which could not possibly have been 
formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my 



* Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol. II.. p. 192. 
t Descent of Man, Vol. II., p. 370. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 219 

theory would absolutely break down."* Accordingly, he 
attempts to show how accidental variations resulted in 
the formation of the Eye.f It is needless to multiply 
quotations, seeing his whole Book, " The Origin of 
Species," is one continued argument against Plan, or 
Design, or Final Cause. 

Proof from the Friends and Advocates of Darwinism. 
Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer, or perhaps 
we should say the co-inventor with Darwin of this 
theory, says, " His work has for its main object to show 
that all the phenomena of living things — all their 
wonderful organs and complicated structures, their 
infinite variety of form, size, and color, their intricate 
and involved relations to each other — may have been 
produced by the action of a few general laws of the 
simplest kind, laws which are in most cases mere state- 
ments of admitted facts." J Professor Huxley tells us that, 
"when he first read Mr. Darwin's 'Origin of Species/ 
that which struck him most forcibly was the conviction 
that teleology (the doctrine of Design or Final Causes) 
had received its death-blow at Mr. Darwin's hands." || 
The same authority makes the statement: "For the 
notion that every organism has been created as it is and 
launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes 
the conception of something, which may fairly be termed 
a method of trial and error." Dr. Louis Bilcliners 

* Origin of Species, p. 227. 

t Sec Origin of Species, p. 146 (American Edition). 
X The Theory of Natural Selection, p. 265. 
|| Lay Sermons, p. 330. 



220 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

view and understanding of this theory are thus clearly 
expressed : " Darwin's theory is the most thoroughly 
naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic 
than that of Lamarck ; according to Darwin, the whole 
development (of the natural world) is due to the gradual 
summation of innumerable minute and accidental opera- 
tions."* Carl Vogt, after passing some high commenda- 
tions on " The Descent of Man," adds : " It cannot be 
doubted that Darwin's theory turns the Creator — and 
his occasional intervention in the revolutions of the 
earth and in the production of species — without any 
hesitation out of doors, inasmuch as it does not leave 
the smallest room for the agency of such a Being." f 
"According to the teleological theory," says Haeckel, 
"the vegetable and animal kingdoms are considered 
as the products of a creative agency, working with a 
definite design. . . . That is the view to which Darwin's 
doctrine is directly opposed." Such are the testimonies 
of the friends and advocates of Darwinism, whom we 
cannot suspect of doing it injustice. 

Proof from tlie opjposers of the theory. These without 
exception understand Mr. Darwin as denying Plan or 
Design in creation. It is on this ground that the DuJce 
of Argyll, in his "Reign of Law," rejects and opposes 
the theory. Professor Agassiz viewed and treated it in 
the same light, and his strong repugnance to it grew out 
of its atheistical tendency. And Professor Janet, of the 
Paris Faculte* des Lettres, says, "The perilous and 



* Sechs Vorlesungen uber die Darwiniscke TJieorie, Vol. I., p. 125. 
t Vorlesungen uber den Menschen, etc., Vol. II., p. 260. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 221 

slippery point in Darwin's theory is, when he wants to 
establish that a blind and designless nature has been 
able to bbtain, by the occurrence of circumstances, the 
same results which man obtains by thoughtful and well- 
calculated industry." * In a discussion on the Credibility 
of Darwinism, Rev, Walter Mitchell, Vice-President of 
the Victoria Institute, makes this remark : " There is 
one thing which the animate, as well as the inanimate 
world declares to man, one thing everywhere plainly 
recorded, if we will only read it, and that is the impress 
of Design, the Design of infinite wisdom. Any theory 
which comes in with an attempt to ignore design as 
manifested in God's creation is a theory, I say, which 
attempts to dethrone God. This the theory of Dar- 
win does endeavor to do." The same able and lucid 
authority, speaking of Mr. Darwin's theory in connection 
with another subject, says, "His whole endeavor has 
been to push the Creator farther and farther back out 
of view. The most laborious part of Darwin's attempt at 
reasoning — for it is not true reasoning — the most laborious 
part of his logic and reasoning, is intended to eliminate, 
as perfectly as any of the atheistical authors have endeav- 
ored to do, the idea of design." f " The theory of Mr. 
Darwin," observes Dr. Dawson, Principal of the Univer- 
sity of Montreal, " removes from the study of nature 
the ideas of final cause and purpose; and the evolu- 
tionist, instead of regarding the world as a work of 
consummate plan, skill, and adjustment, approaches 

* The Materialism of the Present Da//, p. 174. 
t Transactions of the Victoria Institute. 



222 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

nature as he would a chaos of fallen rocks, which may 
present forms of castles, and grotesque profiles of men 
and animals, but they are all fortuitous, and without 
significance." * 

Dr. William Fraser, of Scotland, in a work of great 
ability, just issued, gives his understanding of this theory 
in the following clear and forcible sentences — he is speak- 
ing of colors : " Not a flower in the field or the forest, 
not a colored shell in sea or river, that fails to illustrate 
or exemplify permanent principles. Even the commonest 
of all our early favorites shows the beautiful distribution 
of colors with as much exactness as the cell of the honey- 
bee or the whorl of the shell its mechanical lines. In 
his well-known work on 'The Origin of Species,' Mr. 
Darwin asks us to believe that these beautiful adapta- 
tions are not in the least due to design, but to the slow 
operations and decisions of natural selection, if indeed 
there can be decision without design. The very colors 
which man most admires are, according to this school 
of theorists, in no way representative of purpose. That 
the sky is blue and not scarlet, that the leaves of the 
landscape are not yellow and the soil not crimson, are 
the chance evolutions of this mysterious something, which 
has neither intelligence nor beginning of days. The 
mere suggestion that all this wealth of beauty in varied 
colors, and proportion in form, and gracefulness in move- 
ment, and the tint of the atmosphere^ are in any respect 
an end and not accidentals, Mr. Darwin resentfully rejects. 



* The Story of Earth and Man, p. 318. 



THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 223 

They are with him no part of a plan, nor are they 
intended to please. It is really difficult to believe in the 
possibility of such convictions as are seriously asserted. 
4 Some naturalists/ he says, 6 believe that very many 
structures have been created for beauty in the eyes of 
men, or for mere variety. This doctrine, if true, would 
be absolutely fatal to my theory.' It comes to this, that 
the theory we are asked to accept instead of that record 
in the first chapter of Genesis, is one which gives beauty 
without an end, laws without an author, works without 
a maker, and co-ordination without design." 

In the same work we find this passage : " This theory 
requires us to believe that, without the slightest refer- 
ence to any definite End whatever, sponges, molluscs, 
frogs, fishes, monkeys, men, and all other living things 
have, in the turmoil of ages, been assigned, by Natural 
Selection alone, all their varied proportions and spheres. 
It requires of us to believe, against all the evidence 
which confronts us, that there is no design whatever in 
the manifold structures of plants and animals ; and none 
in those bodies of ours, so fearfully and wonderfully 
made. It requires us to believe that man has been 
evolved, not in conformity with any purpose, but merely 
amid the sequences of events, by insensible degrees, and 
after innumerable experiments and failures. All organ- 
ized existences are meaningless results." * 

It is sufficiently evident, then, from the testimony of 
both friends and foes, that the theory of Darwin denies 



* Blending Lights, pp. 88, 89, 104, 106. 



224 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

all jplan and design in this material world, and teaches 
that all we behold and study and admire in the whole 
wondrous realm of nature, are the results of accidental 
variations, or blind chance. 

The absolute absurdity of such a theory will, perhaps, 
be best presented and best appreciated by the considera- 
tion of a few specific facts. 

(a) The earliest animated beings, of which Mr. Darwin 
has been able to catch a glimpse, were the little marine 
creatures already mentioned, " leathery sacks," cleaving 
to the ledges and fragments of rocks in the primeval 
seas ; from these, after a long period — no one knows or 
can know how long — came fishes; the first of these, we 
are told, were of very simple organization, without any 
specific means or members to move from place to place. 
Long — no one knows or can know how long — did they 
again struggle for existence in this helpless condition. 
But at length a better day is destined to dawn upon them 
— they are to be furnished with Fins. And how are these 
limbless creatures to acquire these means of locomotion ? 
On this wise — A little rugosity or roughness, by chance, 
occurs on the side of a fortunate individual ; this proves 
advantageous in swimming, as it affords a point of resist- 
ance to the water ; by repeated use, it amounts to a 
small process. A fair beginning now is made — this 
process is transmitted to posterity ; it is preserved and 
transmitted again — variations and improvements con- 
tinually accumulating with the flow of time, until at last 
it is developed into a perfect fin, with bones, muscles 
and covering all complete. This, it might be thought, is 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 225 

marvel enough to be produced by " fortuitous variations " 
— but behold a second and a greater. While all this is 
going on, a similar rugosity makes its appearance on the 
other side of the animal — not farther back nor farther 
on, not higher, not lower, but, as could be wished, at a 
point just exactly opposite the first; and this by another 
series of minute variations, all sheerly accidental, yet, 
wonderful to relate, corresponding in all particulars and 
at every stage of transmission to the former series until 
it reached its consummation in a perfect fin and an 
exact mate for the former ! Now, the once limbless fish 
has a pair of fins ; but they are situated so near one 
extremity of the body, that it needs another pair at a 
suitable distance from the opposite extremity in order 
to balance itself with ease and propriety. And lo, still 
by accident — accident fourfold wonderful and happy — 
rugosity for a third and a fourth time appear, precisely 
at the proper points of balance, and like the former pass 
through a series of variations and transmissions, until, 
after the lapse of ages, both reach the form and functions 
of perfect fins as before ! It was after some such manner 
as this, we are gravely told, that fish advanced and im- 
proved and came into possession of a complete set of fins, 
the most admirable instruments for instant and rapid 
motion in water that the human mind can conceive. 

But the wonder ends not here — By the magic of the 
same " fortuitous variations," these fins were again con- 
verted fur birds into wings, clothed with down and 
shooting out graceful and gorgeous feathers ; for carniv- 
orous beasts into paws, armed with bent and destructive 

15 



226 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

claws ; for oxen and horses into a solid foot, encased in 
strong and horny hoofs ; and for man into a hand, an 
instrument so complex in its parts, yet so beautifully 
formed ; so fine in its sensibility, yet so vigorous in its 
action; so quick in its movements and yet so delicate 
in its touches, that it stands unrivalled as a mechanical 
excellence. All this effected by fortuitous or, accidental 
variations ! The humble believer in the Bible is often 
scoffed at as the victim of credulity ; but nothing within 
the lids of that sacred book makes a demand for the 
hundredth part of the credulity that it requires to 
receive such a theory as this. 

(b) Up to a certain period in the history of our globe, 
animal parents suckling their young was a thing un- 
known. How, then, on the Development Hypothesis, 
originated this wonderful and happy function ? How 
were the Mammary Glands or breasts first called into 
existence, and into operation? How came the young 
capable of and addicted to the practice of sucking? 
Happy fortuity again ! At an unknown date, in an 
unknown region, and through an unknown cause it 
happened (i. e., evolutionists assume that it happened) 
that the conditions of physical nature underwent an 
unfavorable change. In these circumstances, the young 
of a certain animal, ready to starve, naturally nestled 
up to its mother, and, by accident, its mouth rubbed 
against a little sebaceous or fatty prominence on her 
side ; this, in its hungry condition, it licked — again it 
did the same — presently it did something more, it at- 
tempted to suck it, drawing therefrom a drop of half- 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 227 

nutritious fluid — thus gratified, the operation was re- 
peated, and with the same result. This novel inter- 
course between parent and offspring, once commenced, 
was not suffered to fall into desuetude. Both the saba- 
ceous prominence and the propensity to suck it were 
transmitted — nobody can tell how — to be improved by 
the practice of the next generation; this transmission 
and improvement were repeated, and again repeated, 
until, in the process of generations, what originated in a 
pimple ended in swelling mammee yielding a copious flow 
of sweet nutritious milk, and what began with the young 
in an accidental touch deepened into an ineradicable 
instinct for sucking. Happy concurrence ! Wonderful 
fortuity ! The young creature that could thus call into 
existence and into operation so excellent a fountain of 
nourishment, and initiate so effectual a process to extract 
it, it must be admitted, was justly entitled to the dis- 
tinction of being " the fittest to survive." Let not the 
reader, however, suffer his imagination to carry him back 
to look for this notable creature among the quadruped 
inhabitants of the earlier or of the later Tertiaries, for 
the credit of this ingenious discovery certainly and solely 
belongs to a biped of the very last formation — the Author 
of The Or igin of Species. 

But let us review and examine this extraordinary 
account of the origin of mammals. The act of extract- 
ing milk from the mammae or breasts is quite a complex 
and difficult pneumatic operation, and closely resembles, 
in part, the action of an air-pump. The young creature 
in this act must empty the mouth entirely of air by the 



228 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

simultaneous action of several distinct sets of muscles ; 
the atmosphere then pressing on the whole external 
surface of the secreting organ forces the milk through 
its numerous channels till they all meet and discharge 
their contents through the nipple into the vacuum 
created in the mouth ; and from thence, still without 
admitting the air, the milk is conveyed by another sys- 
tem of muscles to the gullet and the stomach. Now, 
supposing an infant born into the world without the 
faintest instinctive propensity to nurse, in what way 
would the mother go to work to induce it to put all 
these muscles into proper action, or to teach it this 
difficult art ? Would there be the slightest hope of her 
succeeding before the helpless little one would famish 
and die? Is it credible, then, that the half-starved 
young of a brute, without instruction, without help, 
without skill, and without a glimmer of instinct to impel 
or to guide it, would live to learn such an operation, and 
to learn it, too, before a mamma or a teat was in exist- 
ence on which it could practice? And waiving this 
difficulty, is it credible that the young of any animal 
was ever saved from starvation by sucking a drop or two 
of scarcely nutritious fluid from " an accidental hyper- 
trophied cutaneous gland " of its mother ? Above all, 
is it credible, is it conceivable, that such complicated 
and admirable organs as the mammary glands could be 
produced through such means ? Such an attempt to ac- 
count for the mammal functions of animals is thoroughly 
unsatisfactory — is, indeed, absolutely absurd. And yet 
the men, who are far too great philosophers to receive 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 229 

the Scripture account, that the All-wise and Almighty 
God created every animal after its own kind, can believe 
all this, when there is not so much as one fact, or even 
the shadow of a fact, for its foundation ! 

(c) Let us take another example, and one of a some- 
what different character. To the Fish Class of animals 
belong about a dozen kinds, grovelling at the bottom of 
the sea, or in the slime of rivers, which are possessed 
of the astonishing faculty of collecting and wielding at 
their pleasure the most subtle of all the powers of nature 
— they can actually shoot out lightning to repel their 
enemies or to kill their prey. For this purpose, the 
Electric Bay or Torpedo, for example, is provided with 
a battery closely resembling, but greatly exceeding in 
the beauty and compactness of its structure, the batteries 
contrived by man, whereby he has now learned to make 
the Laws of electricity subservient to his will. In this 
living battery of the Torpedo, there are no less than 940 
hexagonal columns, like those of bees' comb ; and each 
of these is subdivided by a series of horizontal plates, 
which appear to be analogous to the plates of the Voltaic 
Pile. The whole is supplied with an enormous amount 
of nervous matter ; four great branches of which are as 
large as the animal's spinal cord, and these spread out 
in a multitude of thread-like filaments round the pris- 
matic columns, and finally pass into all the cells — an 
arrangement altogether strikingly similar to that by 
which an electric current, passing through a coil and 
round a magnet, is used to intensify the magnetic force.* 



* See Prof. Owen'a Lects. on Comp. Anat., Vol. II.— Fishes. 



230 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

Here then are exhibited clearly and in effective opera- 
tion all the mysteries which have been gradually un- 
folded by laborious study and innumerable experiments, 
from the days of Galvani to those of Faraday and Tyn- 
dall. Here are displayed the most perfect knowledge of 
and conformity to diverse and complicated natural laws ; 
here we have an intricate apparatus not only most 
effective for generating electric force within the animal's 
body, but also having as clear a reference to its effect 
on the nervous systems of other animals, as the message 
transmitted by an electric telegraph has to the person 
for whom it is sent. 

Now, this most wonderful organ of the Torpedo, con- 
sisting of thousands of distinct and dissimilar parts — 
columns, plates, coils, cells, muscles, ligaments — all 
united and combined with unerring skill into the most 
scientific mechanism that can be conceived — all this, 
according to the Development Theory, is the product of 
a series of accidents, or fortuitous variations, occurring 
intermittently and accumulating insensibly through in- 
definite ages! Such an idea not only contradicts all 
reason, but confounds all imagination ; and seriously to 
propose it for the acceptance of intelligent persons is 
little less than an attempt to perpetrate an outrage on 
their common sense. Take a bushel of letters, and pour 
them into the mouth of a cannon, and then fire it, 
and blow them into the air — and sooner might we ex- 
pect to find these letters fallen on the ground in such 
an order as to compose "Adam's Morning Hymn," or 
Euclid's demonstration of his " Forty-seventh Proposi- 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 231 

tion," than to find such scientific mechanisms, as these 
living batteries, built up by accidental or fortuitous 
variations. Indeed, here, the vigorous and vivid im- 
agination of Darwin himself seems utterly baffled, and 
is forced to make the acknowledgment — "It is impossi- 
ble to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs 
have been produced." * And no other man can conceive 
how, on his hypothesis, mechanisms such as these could 
have been brought into existence. 

There is not an organ or an object with which the 
human mind is acquainted that more clearly or cer- 
tainly manifests Intelligence, and intelligence of the 
highest order, than do these living electric batteries. 
Here are means as clearly employed and adapted to 
accomplish ends, as the mill is to grinding corn, or the 
loom to weaving cloth. Here is unquestionable knowl- 
edge of the existence and universal presence of electri- 
city, a fact utterly unknown to man until these latter 
days. Here is obviously displayed a perfect understand- 
ing of all the laws that govern the accumulation and 
discharge of this mysterious element. Here is exhibited 
the most consummate skill in the subordination of these 
various and complicated laws to a most difficult and 
curious purpose. Here are diverse exquisite adjustments 
made in perfect accordance with all those laws, as well 
as with the laws and properties of animal tissues. Here 
is as evident a selection of materials on the ground of 
their properties, as of the metals and acids employed by 



* Origin of Sptcies, 6th Ed., p. 150. 



232 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

man for his batteries. Here is a clear comprehension 
of the nature of electricity, and of its effects on the 
nervous organs of those animals against which it should 
be discharged. Here is thorough acquaintance with the 
mysteries which man has been able to unfold only after 
long and laborious study. Here, in short, is scientific 
mechanism, which, when contrived by man, was an- 
nounced and heralded through the world as a triumph 
of his genius.- — And all this we are gravely taught by 
Evolutionists to ascribe to blind, aimless, "fortuitous 
variations " ! ! 

(d) We select our next illustration of the absurdity 
of the Development Hypothesis from a set of facts differ- 
ing from all the foregoing — the transformation of insects. 
Let us follow the Butterfly through the several stages 
of its existence. "Our starting-point is a diminutive 
and almost invisible egg ; from this comes a worm, scarce 
an inch long at maturity. After spending its appointed 
days in this prone and lowly form, it languishes ; refuses 
to eat; ceases to move; becomes wrapped in a silken 
shroud; this soon changes into a dusky crust; and in 
this, as in its coffin, it remains apparently dead. The 
time of its sepulture, usually six or seven months, having 
passed away, it begins to acquire new life and vigor; 
presently it bursts open its coffin cell, and comes forth ; 
no longer, however, an offensive, crawling worm, but 
changed and fashioned into a beauteous butterfly, fur- 
nished with limbs and wings, and decked in down of 
purple and gold. It now takes rank with a new and 
superior race of beings; it mounts the air. ranges from 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 233 

flower to flower, rises in exhilarating flights awards the 
glorious orb of day, rejoicing in its new and splendid 
existence."* — Look again at the more wonderful trans- 
formation, if possible, of the Sitaris, a species of beetle. 
This insect, unlike the butterfly, instead of at first ap- 
pearing in its grub stage, and then, after a time, putting 
on the adult form, is at first active, and furnished with 
six legs, two long antennas, and four eyes. After living 
in this form for a definite period, and subsisting on the 
eggs of other insects and whatever else is congenial to 
its taste, it begins to languish and change ; it presently 
loses its eves, legs and antennae; and becoming thus 
rudimentary, it sinks into an ordinary grub-like form ; 
but it does not close its existence in this humble con- 
dition. After the lapse of the proper time, it undergoes 
another transformation, and acquires a new set of legs, 
eyes, etc., all complete, and emerges into the form and 
habits of a perfect beetle ! — That such processes as the 
above should have arisen by the accumulation of minute 
accidental variations in structure and habit is absolutely 
incredible, for there is not only an utter inadequacy, 
but also an utter incompatibility between the cause 
assigned and the results observed. Desperate, indeed, 
must be the desire to rid the world of its Makers 
presence, that can be willing to transfer its management 
to such a figment as this theory. 

(e) To the foregoing examples we shall now add one 
or two taken from the human system, for according to 



* Science and the Bible, p. 470. 



234 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

the theory of evolution, Man, no less than the brute 
creation, is the product of "fortuitous variations" 
and " natural selection." Out of the many marvellous 
mechanisms that at once present themselves, we select 
first the Organs of Speech. These are mainly situated 
within the cavity of the mouth. In order to ready and 
accurate utterance the mouth itself must be so constituted 
that its several parts shall be capable of assuming a dis- 
tinct configuration for every word and every sound. The 
proper muscles must bring instantaneously the jaws, the 
teeth and the lips into their precise position. Each 
syllable of articulated sound also requires for its utter- 
ance a specific action of the tongue ; and to qualify this 
member for its marvellous office, its muscles are required 
to be so numerous, and so implicated with one another, 
that they cannot be traced by the minutest dissection ; 
yet all must be so arranged that neither their number, 
nor their complexity, nor the entanglement of their 
fibres, shall in anywise impede its motion, or in any 
degree render its action uncertain. And nothing is 
more remarkable in all the living world than the variety, 
quickness and precision of motion, of which the tongue is 
capable. How instantaneously are its positions assumed, 
and how instantaneously dismissed — how numerous are 
its permutations, yet how infallible ! Besides all this, 
from the back part of the mouth, there must be opened 
a passage of remarkable construction for the admission 
of air into and out of the lungs ; and connected with this 
are whole systems of muscles, some in the larynx, and 
without number in the tongue, for the purpose of modu- 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 235 

lating that air in its passage with the requisite varia- 
tions, compass and precision. And lastly, there must be 
a specific contrivance for dividing the pneumatic part 
from the mechanical, and for preventing one set of 
actions interfering with the other. 

Nothing can exceed the exactness and perfection re- 
quired in all these parts, in order to the ready, accurate 
and clear utterance of the mind's thoughts. " I am speak- 
ing to you at this moment," says Professor Huxley, " but 
if you were to alter, in the minutest degree, the propor- 
tion of the nervous forces now active in the two nerves 
which supply the muscles of my glottis, I should become 
suddenly dumb. The voice is produced only so long as 
the vocal cords are parallel ; and these are parallel only 
so long as certain muscles contract with exact equality ; 
and that again depends on the equality of action of those 
two nerves I spoke of. So that a change of the minutest 
kind in the structure of one of these nerves, or in the 
structure of the part in which it originates, or of the 
supply of blood to that part, or of one of the muscles to 
which it is distributed, might render all of us dumb." * 

Such is the apparatus of speech — an apparatus the 
most complicated and yet the most perfect in its struc- 
ture, the most delicate in its adjustments and yet the 
most infallible in its operations — an organism of inesti- 
mable advantages as well as of unfathomable conse- 
quences to man ; the organism, indeed, which gives to 
him his power and pre-eminence over all the living 



* Huxley's Origin of Species, p. 149. 



236 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

tenants of the globe, and without which he never could 
attain his high intellectual and moral destiny. — And all 
this, we are seriously called upon to believe, is, after all, 
but a mere accidental occurrence, but the product of mere 
"fortuitous variations " and "natural selection" ! To say 
nothing of the teleological aspect of the question, of God's 
purpose or man's destiny, the improbability that such 
sublime mechanisms as the organs of human speech 
have been produced by "accidental variations" is so 
great, that the idea is at once reduced to a sheer ab- 
surdity. Nor is this absurdity relieved in the slightest 
degree by saying that these organisms were not brought 
about at once, but by infinitesimal variations carried on 
through unnumbered ages. No matter how minute or 
insensible the variations, and no matter through what 
cycles of ages they have been going on — here are, come 
they when or how they might, what are indisputa- 
ble and convincing evidences of Mind; here are con- 
trivances, productions, adjustments and combinations, 
which nothing less than infinite knowledge, skill, and 
poioer could have produced. This is the instant and 
instinctive decision of natural reason. 

We have spoken of the improbability of such organs 
as those of speech being the product of " accidental varia- 
tions" — let us attempt to illustrate this. We wish to 
find produced by accident, ray, so common a thing as a 
pebble, but one combining in itself a few simple qualities. 
Let us enter upon the search. On yonder sea-shore are 
myriads and myriads of pebbles of every description of 
rock, that have been rolled and " insensibly " fashioned 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 237 

under the advance and retreat of "fortuitous" waves for 
unnumbered ages. Now, for a certain purpose, we want 
one that is perfectly round or spherical — what is the 
probability of finding it? Not great; still among so 
many, it is possible that such a one may be discovered. 
But to suit our purpose, it must also be just three-fourths 
of an inch in diameter: this additional qualification 
greatly lessens our prospect of success, for if one perfectly 
spherical could be found, a thousand to one, if it would 
be of this exact size. Moreover, it is necessary to our 
object, that its iveight be exactly one ounce : this again 
vastly further reduces our probability of finding what 
we- wish, for though of the right form and size, yet 
another thousand to one, if it should prove also of this 
precise weight. Again, it is required for the end we 
have in view that it be of pink color : this quality added 
to the foregoing three, as is obvious, lessens the faint 
degree of probability left a thousand times still further. 
Once more, the pebble we are seeking must possess pre- 
cisely such a degree of hardness, neither less nor more ; 
and this, at length, sinks our probability below appre- 
ciation. Lastly, the pebble we are in quest of must 
possess magnetic properties — to find this in connection 
with all the foregoing — of this, there remains abso- 
lutely no degree of probability. Though the ocean 
waves, and volcanic fires all the world around, have been 
ceaselessly at work on countless millions of rock frag- 
ments of every quality for millions of ages, yet we may 
safely say that there has not yet been produced by this 
fortuitous operation a single pebble combining in itself 



238 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

these half-a-dozen simple qualities. — This, then, may 
serve to convey an idea how utterly improbable it is 
that even one of the exquisite and complicated parts that 
enter into the construction of the organs of speech has 
been produced by " fortuitous variation," for there is not 
one of these but possesses more than half-a-dozen distinct 
and essential qualities. And if the production of one 
part fortuitously, be so utterly improbable, what human 
language, or human numbers, can express the improba- 
bility of all the diversified parts being thus produced, 
and produced simultaneously, and produced, too, in 
mutual and perfect adaptation for harmonious and in- 
fallible action endlessly varied ! 

(/) We select for our next and last example the 
Eye, the choicest and most enchanting of all our cor- 
poreal endowments. It is not necessary to our purpose to 
give a formal and detailed description of the anatomy and 
physiology of this organ — it will be sufficient to glance at 
a few of its prominent and remarkable features. 

(1.) The eye is constructed with evident and distinct 
reference to an element without itself, and an element 
the most ethereal and sublime in all nature — Light 

(2.) Its form is that of an ellipsoid, just that shape, 
out of ten thousand possible shapes, which mathemati- 
cians have demonstrated to be the only one that can 
refract all the rays of light to a single surface, and thus 
afford distinct vision. 

(3.) It consists of a great number of parts, differing 
in their material and their forms and their offices, yet 
so related and so skilfully combined as to compose an 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 239 

instrument of exactness and efficiency which no human 
effort can hope to approach, far less to attain. 

(4.) To qualify it for its important function, the eye 
is encompassed with three membranes or coats; the 
outermost (sclerotic) is exceedingly firm and dense, and 
gives to it the mechanical support necessary for the 
preservation of its form ; within this is another coat 
(choroid) whose main office is to supply it with nourish- 
ment, and by its black interior to absorb any scattered 
rays that might interfere with clear sight ; within this 
again is spread the retina, the only part of the whole 
nervous system susceptible of impression from lumi- 
nous rays. 

(5.) The interior of the eye is occupied with three 
transparent media, called the aqueous, the crystalline, 
and vitreous humors; these form lenses of different 
character for the convergence of the rays of light, so as 
to meet and form pictures of external objects on the 
retina. 

(6.) The retina is an exceedingly thin and delicate 
layer of nervous matter supported by a fine membrane, 
and is spread in the form of just such a concave and 
just at such a distance behind the lenses as are indis- 
pensable to distinct vision — any change, even the slight- 
est, in the amount of this distance, or in the character of 
this concu r, would infallibly result in a defective sight. 

(7.) The lenses are formed of substances having 
different retractive powers, so as to prevent the light 
from being resolved into prismatic colors, and so give 
to objects a tinge which does not belong to them ; for 



240 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

this purpose the crystalline lens is constructed of an 
infinite number of concentric layers, which increase in 
their density as they succeed one another from the 
surface to the centre ; by this means an optical difficulty 
is overcome in a way quite inimitable to human art. 

(8.) The perforation of the Iris, or the Pupil, by 
which the light is admitted into the eye, is a very 
remarkable arrangement : the Iris is composed of two 
layers of contractile fibres ; the one, forming concentric 
circles ; the other, disposed like radii between the outer 
and inner margin ; when the former act, the pupil is con- 
tracted ; when the latter act, the breadth of the Iris is 
diminished, and the pupil is, of course, dilated. By 
this refinement of ingenuity, acting spontaneously, the 
quantity of light admitted into the interior of the eye is 
regulated, and accommodated to the extreme sensibility 
of the retina. What structure can be more artificial, or 
what machinery can be more exquisite in its operation, 
than this ! 

(9.) The eye is furnished with a complete system of 
muscles, six in number, by which it can be rapidly 
turned at will in any direction, so as to vary the field of 
vision, as necessity, pleasure or fancy may dictate. Four 
of these act by direct contraction, turning the eye up or 
down, to the right or the left ; the other two serve to 
give it an oblique direction — one of these is remarkable 
for the artificial manner in which its tendon passes 
through a cartilaginous pulley in the margin of the 
orbit, and then turns back again to be inserted into the 
eye-ball to give it a degree of rotation on its axis ; in 



THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 241 

no other way could the tendon pull in the required 
direction. 

(10.) In the hollow of the orbit, above the eye, is 
planted the lachrymal gland, a self-acting fountain of 
tears, which gently spread and flow over its pellucid 
surface, to lubricate its motions, and to wash away any 
particle of dust, or other irritating substance that may 
happen to be introduced. 

(11.) Each eye is furnished with a well-contrived 
conduit to carry off the superfluous moisture into the 
nostril, to be evaporated with the warm breath. 

(12.) Each eye is furnished with lids, like curtains, 
to close over it in sleep, to wipe it, to cut off the outer 
rays of light that would confuse vision, and to protect it 
against blows, or dust, or any other means of injury; 
and the rapidity with which these lids open and close is 
past all admiration. 

(13.) The eye is furnished with a most delicate yet 
most efficient system of pulleys and ligaments, that with- 
out a nloments delay alter its convexity and relative 
position of parts, so as to adapt it to perceive objects at 
different distances — an operation slowly and with some 
difficulty effected by man in his telescope by lengthening 
or shortening the tube. 

(14.) The eye is endued with a refinement and acute- 
ness of perceptivity that is utterly beyond the reach of 
human imagination. This will plainly appear from a 
moment - reflection upon the manner in which different 
colors are produced. According to the present and 
generally accepted theory, light consists in vibrations 

16 



242 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

excited by the sun in a medium called Liiminiferous 
Ether, and impressions of different colors are produced 
in the eye by the different rates and lengths of these 
vibrations, as reflected by various bodies or substances. 
Thus to produce Red Color, the ray of light must give 
37,640 undulations in an inch, and 458,000,000,000,000 
in a second; Yellow requires 44,000 in an inch, and 
535,000,000,000,000 in a second; Blue, 51,110 in an 
inch, and 622,000,000,000,000 in a second. Such facts 
at once astonish and overwhelm the mind. The minute- 
ness and velocity expressed by these high numbers 
immeasurably transcend the sublimest efforts of the 
imagination, and yet they do not transcend the power 
of the eye to distinguish as readily between them as 
between color and color, for it is the difference in these 
rates that constitutes color. How supremely exquisite, 
then, this endowment of the eye ! 

(15.) And what is equally if not more wonderful than 
the preceding fact, the eye is provided in some inscrut- 
able manner with the means of expressing the indwell- 
ing mind itself, so that one may look into its crystal 
depths, and see love and hatred, intellect and stupidity, 
scorn and wrath, horror and shame, and almost every 
spiritual state and action. 

(16.) Even the position occupied by the eye is worthy 
of special remark — wisdom could not have chosen a 
better, being the most elevated part of our frame, so as 
to command the most extensive and the least obstructed 
prospect. 

(17.) It is placed in the front, so as most readily to 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 243 

apprize us of whatever may lie in the direction we pro- 
ceed, as well as to preside over the movements of our 
feet and the manifold operations of our hands. 

(18.) It is planted in a deep bony socket, where it is 
comparatively safe from external injuries. 

(19.) It is here imbedded in a soft cushion of fat, of 
all animal substances the best adapted both to its repose 
and motion ; and thus its delicate texture is not hurt by 
the bony walls around it, as it rests on them, or as it 
turns swiftly hither and thither at the bidding of the 
will. 

Such, in brief, is the human eye — an organ scarce an 
inch in diameter, yet embracing all these wonderful 
parts, these marvels of optical laws, and these con- 
trivances of inimitable skill ! If anything could deepen 
our impression or enhance our admiration of its struc- 
ture, it would be, perhaps, to look at and see this living 
mechanism in the very act of taking its enchanting 
pictures. And fortunately, it is not very difficult to 
secure this pleasure. If the sclerotic and choroid coats 
be carefully removed from the posterior part of the eye 
of an ox or a horse, leaving only the retina, and the eye 
thus prepared be placed in a nicely fitting hole in the 
window-shutter of a darkened room, with the cornea on 
the outside, all the objects of the external scene will be 
beautifully depicted, in all their details, on the retina. 

Suppose all this to be done in a darkened chamber on 
the summit of Bunker Hill Monument. Here we find a 
landscape ten miles square, embracing a large city with 
its harbor and shipping, streets and parks, thronged roads 



244 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

and converging railways, brought into our prepared and 
adjusted eye, and clearly exhibited on the canvas of 
its retina within a space not exceeding three-quarters of 
an inch in diameter. The multitude of objects which 
the scene contains are all preserved, are all discrimi- 
nated in their magnitudes, positions, figures, colors, 
and even motions. The clouds drifting along the blue 
heavens, the departing ships with their whitened sails, 
the green waves curling and breaking upon the shore, 
the approaching trains enveloped in dust, the trees 
bending before the breeze and the vanes trembling 
on the spires, vehicles hurrying along the streets and 
men darting across to escape them — these, all these, are 
as really and distinctly in motion in our fairy picture 
on the retina as they are on the face of nature itself. 
How small the space, yet how correct the representation 
— how subtle the touches — how fine the lines — how 
ethereal the coloring — how instinct the whole with life ! 

This may assist us to realize what is daily and hourly 
effected by our own organs of vision. Few spectacles 
are better calculated to raise our admiration than this 
delicate picture, which nature, with such exquisite art, 
and with the finest touches of her pencil, spreads over 
the smooth canvas of this subtle nerve; a picture, 
which, though occupying a space scarce equal to a dime, 
often contains the delineation of a boundless scene of 
earth and sky, full of all kinds of objects, some at rest, 
and others in motion, yet all accurately represented as 
to their forms, colors and positions, and followed in all 
their changes, without the least interference, irregu- 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 245 

larity, or confusion. And when the shades of night 
have gathered round — every one of those countless and 
stupendous orbs of fire, whose light, after traversing 
immeasurable regions of space, at length reaches our 
eye, is collected on its narrow curtain into a luminous 
focus of inconceivable minuteness ; and yet this almost 
infinitesimal point shall be sufficient to convey to the 
mind, through the medium of the optic nerve and brain, 
a knowledge of the existence and position of the far 
distant luminary, from which that light emanated years, 
perhaps, ages before. 

Now, what shall we say to the plan and structure of 
an instrument such as this, comprising within such 
limited dimensions such vast and exquisite powers, of 
which the perceptions comprehend alike the nearest 
and most distant objects, and take cognizance at once 
of the most minute portions of -matter and of bodies the 
largest in magnitude, and can appreciate motions slow 
as the lengthening shadows or swift as those of the 
descending sunbeams ! If here we have not a congeries 
of amazing contrivances and adaptations, there is, there 
can be nothing wonderful. If intelligence can be evinced 
by any disposition, or combination, or co-operation of ma- 
terial substances, Intelligence, and Intelligence of the 
highest order, clearly manifests itself in the construction 
of this organ. If science does or can indicate mind, the 
highest principles of Geometry, Optics, Chemistry and 
Mechanics, as applied in the structure of the eye, demon- 
strate it to be the production of a Mind familiar with all 
the principles which sustain and regulate the universe. 

f . . 



246 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

Yet, the advocates of the Development Theory would 
have us dismiss all such ideas as idle reveries, and be- 
lieve that this wonderful optical instrument (with all 
other animal organisms) is the product of "fortuitous 
variations and natural selection/' * or " the result of 
a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent 
agents" ! f What is this but asking us to abandon the 
guidance of common sense, and to renounce the instinc- 
tive decisions of natural reason ? As well might they 
call upon us to believe that the telescope, by which the 
astronomer explores the heavens, is the result of fortuity 
or accident ; for the eye and this instrument are made 
precisely upon the same principles, both being similarly 
adjusted to the laws by which the transmission and 
refraction of rays of light are governed. And there is 
precisely the same proof that the eye was constructed 
for vision as there is that the telescope was made for 
assisting it. If we are compelled to acknowledge that 
the one has been contrived and formed by intelligence, 
we must admit that the other has been also. The 
telescope and the eye are instruments of the same kind. 
" The end is the same ; the means are the same. The 
purpose in both is alike ; the contrivance for accomplish- 
ing that purpose is in both alike. The lenses of the tele- 
scope, and the humors of the eye bear a complete resem- 
blance to one another, in their figure, their position, and 
in their power ewer the rays of light, viz., in bringing each 
pencil to a point at the right distance from the lens; 



* Darwin. 



t Huxley. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 247 

namely, in the eye, at the exact place where the mem- 
brane is spread to receive it. How is it possible, under 
circumstances of such close affinity, and under the opera- 
tion of equal evidence, to exclude contrivance from the 
one ; yet to acknowledge the proof of contrivance having 
been employed as the plainest and clearest of all propo- 
sitions in the other?"* 

We have said, equal evidence — the truth is, the evi- 
dences of designing intelligence evinced in our organs of 
vision vastly transcend both in number and degree those 
in the telescope. The admirably ingenious means em- 
ployed in the Eye to rectify the aberration of sphericity, 
and the Chromatic aberration, together with those which 
adapt the eye to different degrees of light, and to the 
different distances of objects, -j* clearly demonstrate this 
organ to be the production of One fully acquainted with 
the most secret laws of Optics ; and we may add, that 
it was only by studying and imitating these most skilful 
arrangements in the eye, that man was enabled to correct 
very serious defects in his telescope, and to bring it to 
its present degree of perfection. Can we, then, without 
the grossest and most wilful inconsistency, admit that 
this, the defective copy, is the work of intelligence, and y et 
assert that that, the Perfect Original, is "the result 
of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent 



*Paley , s Natural Theology, Chap. III. 

t For the exposition of the principles on which these corrections and 
adaptations are made, we must refer to works which treat professedly 
on Optics. 



248 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

agents"? But the absurdities of this theory do not 
stop here. 

According to this hypothesis, no animal, nor even 
any member or organ of an animal, has been made for 
any definite purpose or end — all are fortuitous produc- 
tions. This, as before abundantly proved, is not a forced 
inference from the doctrine, but what its advocates 
formally and expressly assert. Thus Professor Huxley — 
" Organisms vary incessantly ; of these variations the 
few meet with surrounding conditions which suit thein 
and thrive; the many are unsuited and become ex- 
tinguished. — Organisms are like grapeshots of which one 
hits something and the rest fall wide. — An organism 
exists because, out of many of its kind, it is the only 
one which has been able to persist in the conditions 
in which it is found." * Thus every animal is produced, 
and every animal continues to exist, simply by chance. 
All living creatures, and all their parts, are the products 
of " fortuitous variations ;" hence, all the members and 
organs of our bodies are "fortuitous" members and 
organs, and not made for any specific ends or purposes — 
that is, our eyes were not made for seeing, nor our ears 
for hearing, nor our hands for handling, nor our teeth 
for masticating, nor our feet for walking; but having 
been fortuitously produced, something was found for 
them to do ! The common sense of mankind must see 
and say that such notions are too absurd to be made 
more so by argumentation. This is precisely the doctrine 



* Lay Sermons, No. 13. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 



249 



of the old heathen, Lucretius, who was wont to say that 
the organ fortuitously produced suggested its own use — 
"quod natum est id procreat usus which Prior, with 
his usual good sense, has thus humorously exposed — 

"Note here, Lucretius dares to teach, 
(As all our youth may learn from Creech,) 
That eyes were made and could not view, 
Nor hands embrace, nor feet pursue ; 
But heedless Nature did produce 
The members first, and then the use. 
What each must act was yet unknown, 
Till all was moved by chance alone. 
As if one built a country seat, 
Then found the walls not fit to eat, 
Or 'nother plant, and wondering see 
No books nor medals on his tree. 
Yet poet and philosopher 
Was he, who durst such whims aver. 
Blessed for his sake be human Beason, 
Which came at last, though late in season! " 

" The evolutionist doctrine," says Principal Dawson, 
"is one of the strangest phenomena of humanity. It 
existed, and most naturally, in the oldest philosophy 
and poetry, in connection with the crudest and most 
uncritical attempts of the human mind to grasp the 
system of nature, but that in our day a system destitute 
of any shadow of proof, and supported merely by vague 
analysis and figures of speech, and by the arbitrary and 
artificial coherence of its own parts, should be accepted 
as philosophy, and should find able adherents to string 
on its thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty stores 
of knowledge, is surprisingly strange." * 



The Story of the Earth and Man, p. 317. 



250 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

We have now pursued this bold hypothesis much 
further than we intended to do when we began to speak 
of it, and certainly far beyond what its intrinsic Value 
or importance deserves. Looking back over the field we 
have traversed, it is natural to ask, Of this whole matter, 
the subject of so much noise and hubbub, what is the 
sum? Why, this — Away at an immeasurable, at an 
ail-but infinite distance in the dim dawn of time, three 
gods stood face to face on our planet — by name, For- 
tuitous Variation, Struggle-) c o? '-existence, and Natural Selec- 
tion ; between them and at their feet, lay a little mass 
of jelly ; upon this, presently, this contending trinity 
fell to work, each eying and watching the doings of 
the others. Under the undesigning hands of the first, 
the yielding mass changed form and divided into parts — 
through the unconscious influence of the second, these 
parts were set in array for mutual destruction, and many 
perished — but by the haphazard intervention of the 
third, the best were rescued. These survived, however, 
only to be subjected to a similar course of treatment 
with the original mass. So again ; and so again. And 
thus labored on these three blind deities without aim, 
without purpose, without intelligence, until, after the 
lapse of ages which no man can number, they brought 
up and wrought out the little mass of jelly upon which 
they began, into all that is curious, or useful, or impor- 
tant, or beautiful in the whole existing animal king- 
dom. This is the Theory of Development! Now, we 
assert without hesitation, that there is nothing in all 
the vagaries of Greek or Koman, Hindoo or Egyptian 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 251 

mythology, that exceeds in absurdity this extravagant 
theory. It truly seems more like the elaboration of a 
delirious mind than the product of sound and sober 
reason. And yet this dream of a. wild and fermenting 
imagination is put forth as Science I If our faith or 
credulity can accept this — if with Mr. Darwin " we can 
find no difficulty in believing " that tadpoles can be de- 
veloped into tigers ; that black bears can be converted 
into whales ; and hairy monkeys transformed into men 
and women, "the pride and glory of creation" — why 
should we hesitate to swallow whole the creed of Brahma, 
or to believe that the earth was hatched from an egg ; 
that the world is standing on the back of a tortoise, that 
the tortoise stands on the back of an elephant, and the 
elephant stands on the mud? "When I listen to the 
language of evolutionists," says Max Muller, " I almost 
imagine I am listening to one of the most ancient hymns 
of the Veda, and that we shall soon have to say again : 
In the beginning there was the golden egg? Surely such 
a theory, like a hundred others before it, after an ephem- 
eral existence, must become the byword of the world, 
and pass silently into that oblivious receptacle of things 
" abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed," described by 
Milton, which, 

"Up whirled aloft, 
Flew o'er the back side of the world, far off, 
Into a limbo large and wide, since called 
The Paradise of Fools:— to few unknown 
Long after." 

It may have come into the mind of the reader long 
ere this, to ask, If the Development Theory is beset with 



252 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

such serious and even insurmountable difficulties, how 
comes it to pass that any intelligent, much less scientific 
men should be found to hold it? For erroneous and 
even absurd theories to find advocates among the pro- 
fessedly learned is nothing new or uncommon in the 
history of science. Of this, any one that will take the 
trouble to read Professor WheweH's History of the Induc- 
tive Sciences, will find abundance of examples in almost 
every branch of human study. Nor is the fact one very 
difficult to be accounted for. An individual that has 
wholly given himself up to a chosen branch of study, 
through the insensible but sure influence of mental 
habit, presently comes to view everything in the light 
of this study ; he becomes largely a man of one idea — 
he has eyes only for one class of facts. And if, concern- 
ing these, he has conceived some special theory of his 
own, fascinating or novel or promising in its character, 
and has become engrossed with it, growing fondness for 
the child of his own brain, presently, renders him alike 
blind and insensible to whatever may have a bearing 
contrary to his wishes. 

" So he that once hath missed the right way, 
The further he doth go, the further he doth stray." — Spenser. 

Great names are not always a warrant for the truth 
or correctness of the theories they advocate. " It should 
not be forgotten that there is no opinion so extravagant 
and wild that it has not been at some time embraced by 
philosophers, by men of science; and it should not be 
forgotten that a very large part of the doctrines held in 
science in past times have been found by more accurate 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 253 

observation to be absurd, and have been dropped by the 
way, and are now numbered and classified with the 
huge monsters — themselves not less monstrous — the 
ichthyosaurians and the plesiosaurians of the old geolog- 
ical periods of our world's history." * 

While the present advocates of the Development 
Theory put forth in general a bold front, it is certain 
that they are by no means themselves so thoroughly 
convinced of its truth. They differ widely among them- 
selves on many important points ; indeed hardly any 
two of them agree. Lamark differed from all who pre- 
ceded him. The author of The Vestiges of Creation 
left Lamark behind. Mr. Darwin sets both of these 
gentlemen aside. M. Tremaux controverts all the 
reasonings of Darwin in favor of a new theory of his 
own. Lamark believed in spontaneous generation, Dar- 
win does not. The author of The Vestiges expounded a 
law of Development, and Mr. Darwin displaces it by 
Natural Selection. Darwin holds that life began in the 
water, Tremaux repudiates this notion and asserts that 
the soil is the origin of all life. Huxley puts forth the 
idea that life may come from dead matter, Darwin 
believes that life was first breathed by the Creator into 
three or four low and simple forms. Darwin teaches 
that Man in common with all other animals is the 
product of Natural Selection, Wallace, his co-theorist, 
asserts that Natural Selection with all its resources 
is utterly inadequate to account for the origin and 



* Barnes' Evidences of Christianity in the Nineteenth Century, p. 93. 



254 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

structure of the human race. Thus we find the most 
distinguished leaders in the field at hopeless war among 
themselves. 

Some of these great theorists evidently feel that the his- 
tory and experience of the past suggest caution — suggest 
that in their heroic march it would not be wisdom to 
destory all the bridges behind them, and so cut off every 
chance for retreat. Hence we hear a leader among them, 
Professor Huxley, hold language such as this — "I accept 
Darwin's hypothesis provisionally in exactly the same 
way as I accept any other hypothesis. Men of science 
do not pledge themselves to creeds ; they are bound by 
articles of no sort ; there is not a single belief that it is 
not a bounden duty with them to hold with a light hand 
and to part with it, cheerfully, the moment it is really 
proved to be contrary to any fact, great or small. And 
if in course of time I see good reasons for such a proceed- 
ing, I shall have no hesitation in coming before you, and 
pointing out any change in my opinion without finding 
the slightest occasion to blush for so doing. So I say 
that we accept this view (Mr. Darwin's) as we accept 
any other, so long as it will help us, and we feel bound 
to retain it only so long as it will serve our great purpose 
— the improvement of Man's estate and the widening of 
his knowledge. The moment this, or any other concep- 
tion ceases to be useful for these purposes, away with it 
to the four winds ; we care not what becomes of it ! "* 
This assuredly is a statement whose inconsistency can be 



* Huxley's Origin of Species, p. 145. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 255 

equalled only by the absurdities of the theory its author 
seeks to uphold. Here is a public instructor, after 
having employed all his distinguished ability and influ- 
ence to propagate a doctrine of the gravest bearings 
among men, who then turns round and says he would 
not be pledged to it, nor blush to change and cast it to 
the winds any day for another. No man confident that 
his position is firm and safe can be so ready to abandon 
it. No man believing that what he holds is the truth 
can be thus willing to part with it. Such language is 
not consistent with honest conviction that the theory set 
forth is agreeable to truth and fact. It may consist very 
well with a fanciful conjecture, or a mere hypothesis — and 
this, in truth, is all there is of the theory of develop- 
ment. No impartial reader of such a passage as the 
above can escape the conviction, that the authors and 
abettors of this doctrine do not really believe it them- 
selves. 

The advocates of Development have all along labored 
to create the impression upon the public mind, that the 
wise and learned are for the most part with them in 
their views, and that the opposers of the doctrine are 
the ill-informed, the interested, and the bigoted and 
superstitious classes. This, it need hardly be said, is 
wide of being a correct statement — indeed, it seems very 
much like the old policy, that would win over adherents 
by representing the victory as being all but won. This, 
we rejoice to say, is far from being the case- -so far, that 
the doctrine of Mr. Darwin is known to be on the wane. 
Of late there has been clearly manifested a disposition, 



256 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

even among those who were at first taken with the 
theory, carefully to review it. St. George Mivart, one 
of the most distinguished of living naturalists, says, 
" Though by no means disposed originally to dissent 
from the theory of 6 Natural Selection,' if only its diffi- 
culties could be solved, I have found each successive 
year that deeper consideration and more careful ex- 
amination have more and more brought home to me 
the inadequacy of Mr. Darwin's theory. ... In spite 
of all the resources of a fertile imagination, he is re- 
duced to the assertion of a paradox as great as any he 
opposes." * 

" It has been fashionable among evolutionists/' says 
the author of Pater Mundi, 66 to claim in a vague way, 
that all the German Science and culture are in favor 
of the new views ; but an actual search by one of our 
most eminent professors among German publications on 
the Development Hypothesis, discloses the fact that, out 
of some thirty works issued within a certain time, more 
than twenty were against the hypothesis, and these as 
much superior to the others in ability and in the repute 
of their authors, as they were in number." f 

Mr. Darwin, in his last edition of The Origin of Spe- 
cies, admits that " authors of the highest eminence seem 
to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has 
been independently created." And in the same work 
he acknowledges that, "the transitional forms joining 
living and extinct species not being found — the sudden 



* Genesis of Species, pp. 74, 75. 



f Second Series, p. 15. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 257 

manner in which several groups of species first appear 
in European formations — the almost entire absence, as 
at present known, of formations rich in fossils beneath 
the Cambrian strata— are all undoubtedly difficulties of 
the most serious nature. We see this in the fact that the 
most eminent palaeontologists, namely, Cuvier, Agassiz, 
Barrande, Fidel, Falconer, E. Forbes, etc., and all our 
greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, etc., 
have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the 
immutability of species." * And in the Introduction 
to his Descent of Man he regretfully observes that " Of 
the older and honored chiefs in natural science, many 
unfortunately are still opposed to evolution in every 
form." Yes, we may add, and not a few of them still 
bow with humility and unabated devotion before the 
throne of the Almighty Creator, and toward the Cross 
of his Son, Jesus Christ. 

The Duke of Argyll holds the following unequivocal 
language — "The various hypotheses of Development, of 
which Darwin's theory is only a new and special version, 
are indeed destitute of proof; and in the form which 
they have as yet assumed, it may justly be said that 
they involve such violations of, or departures from, all 
that we know of the existing order of things, as to de- 
prive them of all scientific basis." f 

Agassiz — higher authority we could not quote — is 
equally clear and decisive in his testimony : " I wish 
to enter my earnest protest against the transmutation 



* Origin of Species, pp. 289, 428. 
17 



f Reign of Laic, p. 29. 



258 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

theory/' he says. " It is my belief that naturalists are 
chasing a phantom, in their search after some material 
gradation among created beings, by which the whole 
animal kingdom may have been derived by successive 
development from a single germ, or from a few germs. 
I confess that there seems to me a repulsive poverty in 
this material explanation, that is contradicted by the 
intellectual grandeur of the universe. I insist that this 
theory is opposed to the processes of nature as we have 
been able to apprehend them ; that it is contradicted by 
the facts of Embryology and Paleontology, the former 
showing us norms of development as distinct and per- 
sistent for each group as are the fossil types of each 
period revealed to us by the latter ; and that the experi- 
ments on domesticated animals and cultivated plants, on 
which its adherents base their views, are entirely foreign 
to the matter in hand." * 

The same high authority, in a lecture recently deliv- 
ered in Cambridge University, says, " That presentation 
of palaeontological phenomena which would make it 
appear that the whole animal kingdom has been mar- 
shalled in a consecutive procession beginning with the 
lowest and ending with the highest, is false to natm-e. 
There is no inevitable repetition, no mechanical evolu- 
tion in the geological succession of organic life. It has 
the correspondence of connected plan. It has just that 
kind of resemblance in the parts, so much and no more, 
as always characterizes intellectual work proceeding 



* As quoted in Pater Mundi, Second Series. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 259 

from the same source. It has that freedom of manifesta- 
tion, that independence, which characterizes the work 
of Mind as compared with the work of Law. I believe 
that all these correspondences between the different 
aspects of animal life are the manifestations of Mind act- 
ing consciously with intention toward one object from 
beginning to end. This view is in accordance with the 
working of our minds; it is an instinctive recognition 
of a mental power with which our own is akin, manifest- 
ing itself in nature. For this reason more than any 
other, perhaps, do I hold that this world of ours is not 
the result of the action of unconscious organic forces, but 
the work of an Intelligent, Conscious Power." * 

While men of the scientific ability and standing of 
Agassiz and Dana in this country, of Sir William Thomp- 
son and the Duke of Argyll in England, and of Milne- 
Edwards and his school in France, oppose the Develop- 
ment Theory, not only by their authority, but by their 
facts and arguments, we may rest assured that the advo- 
cates of this hypothesis are far enough from being so 
certain of their victory as they claim. 

Thus far, nothing which science has discovered either 
contradicts or traverses the simple narrative of creation, 
as given in the Christian Scriptures — And God created 
every living creature that moveth, after 7iis hind. 

From the discoveries of science Christianity has 
nothing to fear, but everything to hope. No disclosures 
of the past, numerous and varied as they have been, 



* Lectures before the Museum of Comp. Zoology, No. 12. 



260 THE OR Y OF E VOL UTION. 

have in anywise damaged or tarnished the cause of the 
Redeemer; on the contrary, they have proved most 
efficient auxiliaries, and furnished the most glorious 
illustrations of the truths which He taught ; and history 
thus warrants us to expect that whatever may yet be 
discovered among plants or animals, whatever may 
be dug from the mountains or dredged from the deep, 
will assuredly yield their willing tribute, and lay it 
meekly at His feet. The sceptical evolutionist of to-day 
may be confident that his new theory is going to under- 
mine the very foundations of the Christian Religion, and 
may already exult in the prospect of its overthrow — and 
the timid believer may be alarmed by his bold preten- 
sions, and may tremble for the result. But how vain 
are the expectations of the one, and how groundless the 
fears of the other ! 66 It is the fiftieth time in which 
Christianity has seemed to the sanguine infidel and 
the timorous believer to be in great peril ; and yet not 
even an outpost has been lost in this persistent warfare. 
Discoveries in Astronomy, Geology, Chemistry and 
Physiology have often looked threatening lor a while; 
but how entirely have they melted away before brighter 
light and more careful study ! Moreover every new 
assault upon Christianity seems to develop its inherent 
strength, and to weaken the power of its adversaries; 
because, once discomfited, they can never rise again. It 
will be time for the infidel to begin to hope, when he 
shall see, what he has not yet seen, a single stone struck 
from one of the bastions of this massive fortress by his 
artillery. And strange that any believer should be 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 261 

anxious for the future, when the history of the past 
shows him that every science, which for a time has been 
forced into the ranks of the enemy, and made to assume 
a hostile attitude, has, in the end, turned out to be an 
efficient ally." * 

II. The Origin of Man. 

The Scripture account of the Origin of Man is explicit, 
full, and peculiar. He is declared to be a creation of 
God — to be the product of a distinct and immediate act of 
His almighty power. He is, moreover, said to be the 
Creator's last and crowning work in this lower world. 

As we peruse the first great chapter of the Bible it is 
very noticeable that when we come to the opening of 
the account of Man's creation, the inspired narrative 
assumes a different tone, and employs a loftier and more 
solemn diction, as if expressly to intimate his pre- 
eminent distinction above all the living creatures which 
had been produced before. Instead of simply issuing 
His fiat as heretofore, the Creator is now described as if 
stepping forth from the throne of His glory for the 
accomplishment of a deed of special importance. To 
denote the superior nature and high destiny of the being 
about to be created, the Elohim is represented as pro- 
ceeding to the work with measured deliberation, and as 
the result of Self-consultation — And God said, Let ns 
make mem. And to indicate the direct and peculiar 
derivation of the creature man, not only is his body 



Hitchcock's Philaaopher and Theologian. 



262 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

described as having been formed immediately by the 
hand of God, but his spirit also as having been given 
by the breath of the Almighty — And the Lord God 

formed man of the dust of the ground, and breatKed into 
his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living 
soul. 

The creature called into being in this wonderful man- 
ner, we are told in very explicit terms, was of a character 
differing widely from all other living things which God 
had made — So God created man in his own image, in the 
image of God created he him : male o,nd female created he 
them. This image consisted not in figure and lineaments 
of body, for God is a Spirit, and no material form can 
bear any similitude to Him. This image and likeness 
lay in the soul of man, and consisted in its capacities to 
resemble God in His moral attributes — in a mind capable 
of true knowledge, a conscience to distinguish right and 
wrong, affections to delight in holiness, and a heart to 
love God with all its powers. These mental and moral 
endowments elevated man incomparably above every 
living creature which the Lord God had made, and as 
the Creator purposed and declared, gave him dominion 
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and 
over every living thing that moved upon the earth. 

The Sacred Record, moreover, relates to us the 
melancholy fact, that the first human pair did not long 
retain this their original high position and holy char- 
acter ; that through temptation they sinned and fell, and 
transmitted to all their posterity their own sinful and 
fallen likeness ; and that thus by one man sin entered into 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 263 

the world, and death by sin. Such is the Inspired History 
of the origin of the human race. 

Widely and essentially different from all this is the 
account which evolutionists undertake to read to us. 
The theory of these, as before stated, makes no dis- 
tinction between man and the brute as to his origin ; he, 
like all else that live and move upon the earth, according 
to this doctrine, has been evolved originally from some 
low and larval form, but proximately from the Old World 
branch of the Simiadce, or monkey family. " Man," 
says Mr, Darwin, "is certainly descended from some 
ape-like creature — a hairy quadruped, furnished with 
a tail and pointed ears, probably arborial in its habits, 
and an inhabitant of the old world." ::: " The early pro- 
genitors of man," he says again, " were no doubt well 
covered with hair, both sexes having beards ; their ears 
were pointed and capable of movement ; and their bodies 
were provided with a tail, having the proper muscles. 
. . . The males were provided with great canine teeth, 
which served them as formidable weapons." f Such is 
the picture drawn of our early parentage ; and though 
expressly admonished by Mr. Darwin that "we need not 
be ashamed of it," yet we are forced to confess that, to 
us, it is alike horrid and repulsive, and that we involun- 
tarily shrink from it ! 

The Scripture account of Man's origin, and that offered 
by the Development Hypothesis, are thus radically and 
essentially different ; to reconcile them, therefore, is 



* Descent of Man, Vol. II., p. 372. f IK Vol. I., p. 198. 



264 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

hopeless, is impossible; and we hesitate not to pronounce 
the futile attempts that have been put forth to do so as 
being simply profane ; for of which of the descendants of 
a " hairy quadruped " can it with any propriety be said, 
that it was brought forth in the image and likeness of 
God ? 0r ? at what point in its lineage or history did 
the ape-like creature sin, and fall, and bring condemna- 
tion upon all its offspring ? But we refrain from pressing 
such questions — they are unseemly. 

No theory could easily be imagined more fundament- 
ally adverse to Christianity than that of development 
as presented by Mr. Charles Darwin; its direct and 
undisguisable bearing is to sap and remove the very 
foundation upon which it rests. Man's original right- 
eousness, his fall into sin and condemnation, and his 
redemption by the death of Christ — these three are the 
fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion. But 
this theory does away with all these. By ascribing the 
origin of man to a hairy brute, it denies his primitive 
righteousness ; by denying his original righteousness, it 
denies his fall ; by denying his fall, it denies his redemp- 
tion therefrom by the death of Christ. It denies that 
primitive man had any knowledge of or belief in " a God 
hating sin and loving righteousness." It is evident, then, 
that under the garb of Development we discover an 
insidious but deadly foe to our holy religion, that hopes, 
by thus gnawing at its roots, to see its whole fair form 
wither away from the earth. 

This theory, moreover, denies to man an immortal 
spirit, and blots out all his hope of future existence. If, 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 265 

as this hypothesis asserts, there has descended from the 
monkey a series of advancing and improving creatures, 
each succeeding one less ape-like and more human- 
like, until at length they developed into man ; it follows 
that man's mind has been derived from the monkey 
mind, just as his body has been derived from the 
monkey body — the two animals, man and the monkey, 
are in their nature identical ; there is, there can be, no 
essential difference. This Darwin openly avows, and 
persistently attempts to prove. Man, according to his 
doctrine, is merely a more perfectly developed animal. 
Hence we are landed in this dilemma — we must either 
hold that all monkeys have, like men, immortal souls ; 
or, that all men, like monkeys, are soul-less and doomed 
to eternal extinction — conclusions alike repugnant to 
religion and to common sense. 

The representation that man has descended from 
" a hairy quadruped " is not less degrading in its influ- 
ence than it is repulsive in its aspect and profane in its 
spirit. This attempt to give man a brutish origin, not 
only lowers him in the scale of being, but in his own 
estimation, and tends inevitably to injure and degrade 
his character. Let our children once be brought to 
believe that they are but brothers and sisters to the 
apes, instead of being the offspring of God, and that 
their forefathers were but beasts in the forests, and it 
will take away from them the most powerful of motives 
to act a rational, worthy and noble part on the great 
stage of human life. 

This materialistic doctrine, we have sufficient reasons 



266 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

to believe, is already beginning to produce its direful but 
legitimate fruits. Denying, as it does, all real distinc- 
tion between man and beast, between the spirit of the 
brute that goeth downward and the spirit of man that 
goeth upward, and thus banishing from the mind and 
heart all sense of accountability — who but must see that 
its direct and certain tendency is to take away the fear 
of God from before the eyes of men, to break down all 
the restraints arising from an apprehension of His right- 
eous judgment, and to extinguish all hope, all desire of 
His approbation and reward in a future state? Those 
teachers who would make man believe that he is a brute 
in his origin, take the most effectual course to make him 
a brute in his character ; and they are, we doubt not, in 
no trivial measure accountable for the reckless disregard 
and violation of law, human and divine — the low estimate 
set on human rights and human life, and the frequent 
dark and shocking crimes — that have so marked the 
past few years. 

Of all this it will be sufficient proof to quote a single 
paragraph from Mr. Darwin's work. Speaking of Natural 
Selection as affecting civilized nations, he says : " With 
savages the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated 
(i. e., are killed off), and those that survive commonly 
exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, 
on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process 
' of elimination ; we build asylums for the imbecile, the 
maimed and the sick ; we institute poor-laws, and our 
medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of 
every one to the last moment. There is reason to be- 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 267 

lieve that vaccination has preserved thousands, who 
from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed 
to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized socie- 
ties propagate their kind. No one who has attended to 
the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must 
be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising 
how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads 
to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting 
in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant 
as to allow his worst animals to breed." * Thus plainly 
are we given to understand, that in building asylums 
for the imbecile, the maimed, the sick ; instituting poor- 
laws ; administering vaccination — endeavoring thus to 
prolong the lives of our fellow-creatures — we are directing 
our care wrongly, and causing a degeneration of the race 
of man ! Who would wish, who would consent, to have 
such a passage as the above introduced into our national 
School Books? Could any sentiment or principle be 
inculcated more ruinous to morals, or more opposed to 
the spirit of Christianity, or more withering to all the 
kindly feelings of our nature? And that dark hint 
at "elimination" — what more effectual encouragement 
could be given to the commission of Infanticide and 
Foeticide, crimes already so shockingly prevalent ? 

Again : This theory which would identify the human 
race with the brutes of the forest, and avers them to be 
subject to the same laws and doomed to the same fate, 
tends to work national as well as individual evil. When 



* Descent of Man, Vol. I., p. 161. 



268 THE OR Y OF E VOL UTION. 

sinful and selfish and sensual beings, as fallen humanity 
are found to be, are taught, as they are by the theory 
of Natural Selection, that it is a law of nature to Man, 
no less than to beast, that the strong should trample 
down and exterminate the weak, and that when they 
are successful in doing so, they are only inheriting their 
legitimate destiny as "the fittest to survive" — what 
results, what fruits could be looked for from such a doc- 
trine but high-handed injustice, oppression and cruelty, 
on the one hand, and suffering, slavery and extermina- 
tion on the other? Is not the tendency, if not the 
design, of evolutionism, therefore, to favor the strong, 
and to crush the weak — to elevate the favored few, and 
to depress the less fortunate multitude ? Is not its very 
spirit that of the tyrant's maxim, " Might makes right?" 
Certain it is that, The Survival of the Fittest, and Lib- 
erty, Fraternity and Equality can never be inscribed 
on the same banner. 

Though the arguments presented in the preceding 
chapter, against the transmutation of Species in general, 
are of course of equal force against this transformation 
of monkeys into men ; nay, are of tenfold greater force, 
for the gulf which divides man from the monkey is 
incomparably broader and deeper than the intervals 
which separate the different species of the inferior crea- 
tures — yet, conclusive as those arguments are, the evil 
bearings of the theory of Natural Selection, as above 
indicated, render it necessary to consider particularly 
the more specific facts urged by evolutionists in support 
of the idea that man is descended from the monkey. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 269 

The arguments offered in support of the theory that 
the human race is descended from the ape race are 
mainly based upon the fact that there exist certain 
points of similarity between the bodily structure of man 
and that of the ape. " It is notorious/' says Mr. Dar- 
win, " that man is constructed on the same general type 
or model with other mammals. All the bones in his 
skeleton can be compared with corresponding bones in a 
monkey, bat, or seal. So it is with his muscles, nerves, 
bloodvessels, and internal viscera. The brain, the most 
important of all the organs, follows the same law, as 
shown by Huxley and other anatomists." * 

This statement, in a general and qualified sense, is 
correct. All admit that man has an animal nature; 
and there is no question that his bodily frame is con- 
structed on the same general plan as that of other mam- 
mal creatures. How could it be otherwise ? Like other 
mammals, man is made to live and move and have his 
being on the earth, in connection with and in depend- 
ence on its material productions. He is made to eat 
and drink, to rest and sleep, like them, and to perform 
numerous other functions precisely similar to theirs. 
Hence his bodily structure and theirs of necessity must 
exhibit many points of resemblance, more or less remote. 
The animal frame of man, all acknowledge, has been 
moulded after the same general type as other mammals ; 
but that affords no grounds for the assumption that they 
are of the same origin. All steam-engines are con- 



* Descent of Man , Vol. I., p. 10. 



270 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

structed on the same general principle, and have many 
parts that can be compared one with another; but that 
is no evidence that the Stationary Engine in the factory, 
and the Locomotive on the Railroad, have been made 
in the same workshop, much less that both have de- 
scended from one and the same engine parent. Man's 
corporeal frame resembles that of the ape, not because 
he is descended from the ape, but because he requires 
for his habitat and special mode of life precisely such a 
bodily structure as he possesses. If this argument of 
evolutionists is, in itself, worth anything, it will prove 
quite as conclusively that the ape is descended from 
man — indeed, a little more so, for to degenerate from 
a higher to a lower is by far the more prevalent course 
of nature. 

Of extant or living monkeys, which the advocates of 
Development designate as being man-like, there are four 
tribes, the Gibbon, the Orang, the Chimpanzee, and the 
Gorilla ; and of these they have chosen the last for com- 
parison with man, as coming upon the whole the nearest 
to the human form, and for this reason serving their 
purpose best. We shall, therefore, confine our observa- 
tions for the most part to the same. 

Between Man and the Gorilla there exist many points 
of wide and distinctive difference, and to these we now 
wish to call the attention of the reader. 

1. Difference in general aspect and habits. — The Gorilla 
is an inhabitant of the equatorial regions of western 
Africa. It is a savage-looking quadruped, thickly cov- 
ered with coarse black hair, excepting the face and ears. 



Gibbon. 

Chimpanzee. Orang, 
Gobilla, 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 271 

Standing on its hind legs, which it sometimes awkwardly 
does, it is found to measure nearly five feet in height. 
Across the shoulders it is disproportionately broad, the 
girth of its chest being almost equal to its height. The 
face is of a dark brown color, almost black. The face 
is very wide and of great elongation. The eyes are very 
large; the nose broad and quite flat, with wide open 
nostrils. The cranium is low and of very small 
capacity; the muzzle broad, and exhibiting a frightful 
array of teeth ; the lips are coarse and prominent, the 
under one being remarkably elastic and mobile, and, 
when the animal is enraged, hangs down over the chin. 
On the head is a high ridge, or crest of hair, resembling 
mane, which meets a transverse ridge of the same running 
round from the back of one ear to the other. The 
animal has the power of moving the scalp freely for- 
ward and backward, and when angry is said to contract 
it strongly over the brow, thus bringing down the hairy 
ridge, and pointing the hair forward, so as to present a 
most ferocious aspect. 

The neck is short, thick, and hairy; the arms are 
very long, reaching some way below the knee ; and the 
hands are huge, the thumb being much larger than the 
fingers. 

The gait is shuffling ; the motion of the body, which 
is never upright as in man, but bent forward, is rolling 
from side to side; it advances by thrusting its arms 
forward, resting the hands on the ground, and then 
giving the body a half-jumping, half-swinging motion 
between them. 



272 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

The dwelling of the Gorilla, if such a thing can be 
called a dwelling, consists simply of a few sticks and 
leaves, supported by the crotches and limbs of a tree; it 
affords no shelter from rain or sunshine, and is occupied 
only at night. 

The Gorilla is an exceedingly ferocious animal; it 
never runs from man, and is an object of terror to the 
natives. It is said, that when the male is first seen, he 
gives a terrific yell that resounds far and wide through 
the forest. His enormous jaws are widely open at each 
expiration. He always rises to his feet when making an 
attack, though he approaches his antagonist in a stoop- 
ing posture. 

Though he never lies in wait, yet, when he hears, 
sees, or scents a man, he immediately utters his char- 
acteristic cry, prepares for an attack, and always acts on 
the offensive. The cry he utters resembles a grunt 
more than a growl, and is similar to the cry of the 
Chimpanzee, when irritated, but vastly lcuder. His 
preparation consists in attending the females and young 
ones, by which he is usually accompanied, to a little 
distance. He, however, soon returns, with his crest 
erected and projecting forward, his nostrils dilated, and 
his under lip thrown down, presenting an aspect of 
indescribable ferocity; at the same time he utters his 
usual yell, designed, it would seem, to terrify his antag- 
onist. Instantly, unless he is disabled by a well-directed 
shot, he makes an onset, and, striking his antagonist 
with the palm of his hands, or seizing him with a grasp 
from which there is no escape, he dashes him on the 



THEORY OF Jl VOLUTION. 273 

ground and lacerates him with his tusks. Such is the 
power of his great jaws that he can, it is said, instantly 
crush the barrel of a musket between his teeth; and 
his exceeding savage nature is sufficiently indicated by 
the implacable desperation of the young, which, so far as 
tried, have proved utterly untamable. 

Such are the character and aspect of the Gorilla — 
maiis nearest ally ! Now, who that, in the exercise of 
simple common sense, contemplates this animal, but 
must instinctively ask, What is there about such an 
ugly and ferocious beast that can be regarded as resem- 
bling man ? What is there in this prone and savage 
quadruped to be compared to the erect and graceful 
and commanding figure of man? What is there in its 
brutish face that makes the most distant approach to 
the human countenance, with its expressive eye, its 
intellectual features, its affecting tear, and the charm 
of its smile? No more than in the grim visage of a 
Grizzly Bear. 

2. Difference in bodily structure. — Man differs from the 
Gorilla, not simply in external appearance and expres- 
sion, but also in the proportions and conformations of 
the parts and members composing his whole system — 
osseous, muscular and nervous. 

There is a marked disproportion in the comparative 
length of the Anns and Legs of man and those of this 
ape. Professor Huxley takes the following method to 
show this — if we call the length of the spinal column in 
man 100, then the length of his arm will be 80, of his 
leg 117, of his hand 26, and of his foot 35. If in like 

18 



274 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

manner we take the Gorilla's spinal column to be 100, 
its arm will be 115, its leg 96, its hand 36, and its foot 
41. For more ready comparison we place these numbers 
side by side: 

Spine. Arm. Leg. Hand. Foot. 

Man 100 80 117 26 35 

Gorilla 100 115 96 36 41 

Difference per cent 35 21 10 6 

Man differs from the Gorilla in the form of the Spine. 
This, in man, is marked by two graceful and important 
curvatures, both of which are absent in that of the 
Gorilla ; and while he has but twelve pairs of Ribs, this 
ape has thirteen. 

Man differs from the Gorilla in the shape and size of 
the Pelvis. In human beings the haunch bones are 
expanded in order to give support to their viscera during 
their habitual erect posture, and to afford a place of 
attachment to the great muscles which enable them to 
assume and preserve that attitude. In both these 
respects the bony girdle of the hips in man differs 
widely from that of this ape which goes on all-fours. 

Man differs from all apes in the structure of the Foot. 
Apes of every kind have the great toe of the foot so con- 
structed as to be able to oppose the other toes, as does 
the thumb the fingers, instead of being parallel with 
them, and exclusively adapted for supporting the body 
on the ground. And all apes are quadrupedal in their 
mode of progression. 

Man differs from the Gorilla in the adaptations of the 
Hand. While the hand of each is made after the same 
plan and contains the same number of bones, yet the two 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 275 

instruments differ widely. "The muscular system of 
the thumb alone," says M. Gratiolet, "establishes a pro- 
found difference, and testifies to an adaptation to very 
different uses." The one is a clumsy paw, whose use is 
limited to climbing trees and plucking wild fruit, the 
other an organ so adapted and correlated to reason and 
inventive genius that " by its aid the earth is weighed, 
and the distance of the sun is measured." 

Man differs from the Gorilla in the form and growth 
of the Teeth. " The teeth of man," says Professor Hux- 
ley, " constitute a regular and even series — without any 
break and without any marked projection of one tooth 
above the level of the rest; a peculiarity which is shared 
by no other living mammal. The teeth of the Gorilla, 
on the contrary, exhibit a break or interval, termed the 
diastema, in both jaws. The size of the eye-tooth in the 
Gorilla being so great that it projects like a tusk, far 
beyond the general level of the other teeth. The roots 
of the false molar teeth in the Gorilla, again, are more 
complex than in man, and the proportional size of the 
molars is different. The Gorilla has the crown of the 
hindmost grinder of the lower jaw more complex, and 
the order of eruption of the permanent teeth is different ; 
the permanent canines making their appearance before 
the second and third molars in Man, and after them 
in the Gorilla. Thus the teeth of the Gorilla exhibit 
marked differences from those of Man in their relative 
size, number of fangs, and order of appearance."* 



* Man's Place in Nature, p. 98. 



276. THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

Man differs from the Gorilla in the possession of a 
Chin; this feature is quite wanting in the Gorilla, as 
also in the Orang and Chimpanzee. 

" The differences between Man's Skull and that of the 
Gorilla are truly immense. In the latter, the face, 
formed largely by the massive jaw-bones, predominates 
over the brain case, or cranium proper : in the former 
the proportions of the two are reversed. In the man 
the occipital foramen, through which passes the great 

EUROPEAN 



^-'""AUSTRALIAN" \\ 




Outlines of the Skulls of an adult Chimpanzee, of a Native 
Australian, and of an average European. 

a. The Glabella; b. tb.eOccipitalprutubeiai.ee. 

nervous cord connecting the brain with the nerves of 
the body, is placed just behind the centre of the base of 
the skull, which thus becomes evenly balanced in the 
erect posture ; in the Gorilla it lies in the posterior third 
of that base. In the Man, the surface of the skull is 
comparatively smooth, and the supraciliary ridges or 
brow prominences usually project but little — while, in 
the Gorilla, vast crests are developed upon the skull and 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 277 

the brow ridges overhang the cavernous orbits, like 
great penthouses." * 

Man differs immensely from the Gorilla also in the 
Capacity of the Cranium, or brain case. The collections 
of Dr. J. B. Davis and Dr. Morton give the following 
figures as the average internal capacity of the cranium 
in the chief races of man : 

Teutonic Family 94 cubic inches. 

Esquimaux 91 

Negroes 85 

Australians 82 

Bushmen 77 

Finns and Cossacks 98 

Average 87 1 

The largest Gorilla cranium examined, according to 
Professor Huxley, measured 34 i cubic inches; the small- 
est 24 cubic inches ; these give us for the Gorilla cranium 
an average of 29 I cubic inches. We see, hence, that the 
average human brain is exactly three times the size 
of the average Gorilla brain. Professor R. Wagner, 
who carefully weighed more than 900 human brains, 
states, "that it may be safely said, that an average 
European child, of four years old, has a brain twice as 
large as that of an adult Gorilla." 

Man differs from the Gorilla in the formation of the 
Brain itself Soemmering enumerates as many as fifteen 
important anatomical differences. The ape brain ex- 
hibits but a skeleton map of the human brain. The two 
differ both in the disposition and proportions of their 
convolutions ; and these convolutions, in the middle and 



* Man's Place in Nature, p. 93. 



278 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

frontal lobes, are developed, M. de Quatrefages informs 
us, in an inverse order of time. 

The great French anatomist, Cuvier, held that the 
distinctions between Man's organism and the organism of 
the highest among the beasts are of such magnitude and 
importance that the human race cannot be classified as 
belonging to the same "Order" with any other creature, 
but must be regarded as constituting an "Order by 
itself." And Professor Owen, at the present time, holds 
the same opinion. 

And Professor Huxley, though an avowed friend of 
the Development Theory, finds himself constrained to 
make this acknowledgment — "I must guard myself 
against a form of misunderstanding, which is very prev- 
alent, viz., that the structural differences between Man 
and the highest apes are small and insignificant. Let 
me take this opportunity, then, of distinctly asserting, 
on the contrary, that they are great and significant; 
that every bone of a Gorilla bears marks by which it 
might be distinguished from the corresponding bone of 
a man ; and that in the present creation, at any rate, no 
intermediate link bridges over the gap between Homo 
and Troglodytes. It would be no less wrong than absurd 
to deny the existence of this chasm. . . . The struc&iral 
differences between Man and the man-like apes certainly 
justify our regarding him as constituting a Family apart 
from them."* 

To the above we may add the testimony of another 



* Man's Place in Nature, pp. 123, 124. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 279 

distinguished naturalist, whose acknowledged abilities 
well qualify him to pronounce an opinion in this matter. 
M. de Quatrefages, Professor of Anthropology in the 
Museum of Natural History at Paris, in a late work on 
this subject,* has entered very fully into the question of 
man's descent from the ape. He has summed up the 
contents of a multitude of contemporary works on this 
subject, and has delivered this as his confirmed opinion 
1 — that, in an anatomical \ point of view, the transmutation 
of the ape into Man is a perfect impossibility. 

" Man and apes in general," says he, " present a most 
striking contrast. The former is a walking animal, who 
walks on his hind legs ; all apes are climbing animals. 
The whole locomotive system in the two bears the 
stamp of these two very different intentions; the two 
types, in fact, are perfectly distinct. 

" The very remarkable works of Duvernoy on the 
Gorilla, and of MM. Gratiolet and Alix on the Chim- 
panzee, have fully confirmed this result as regards the 
man-like apes — a result very important, from whatever 
point of view it is looked at, but of still greater value to 
any one who wishes to apply logically Darwin's idea. 
These recent investigations prove, in fact, that the ape 
type, however highly it may be developed, loses nothing 
of its fundamental character, and remains always per- 
fectly distinct from the type of man ; the latter, 
therefore, cannot have taken its rise from the former. 

" We may place, side by side, for the sake of com- 



* Rapport sur le Pr ogres de V Anthropologic, published in 1868. 



280 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

parison, as was done by M. Primer- Bey, the most 
striking characteristics in man and in the man-like apes. 
As the result we ascertain this general fact — that there 
exists an inverse order of the final term of development 
in the sensitive and vegetative apparatus, in the sys- 
tems of locomotion and reproduction. 

" In addition to this, this inverse order is equally 
exhibited in the series of phenomena of individual 
development. 

" M. Pruner-Bey has shown that this is the case with 
a portion of the permanent teeth. M. Welker, also, has 
demonstrated that the modifications of the base of the 
skull, that is, of a portion of the skeleton which stands 
in the most intimate relation to the brain, take place 
inversely in the man and ape. The sphenoidal angle 
diminishes from his birth in man, but, on the contrary, 
in the ape it becomes more and more obtuse, so as some- 
times to become entirely extinct. 

" But there is another fact which is still of a more 
important character: it is that this inverse course of 
development has been ascertained to exist even in the 
brain itself. 

" In man and the man-like ape, icJien in an adult state, 
there exists in the mode of arrangement of the cerebral 
folds a certain similarity on which much stress has been 
laid ; but this resemblance has been, to some extent, a 
source of error, for the result is attained by an inverse 
course of action. In the ape, the convolutions, which 
form the middle lobe, make their appearance, and are 
completed, before the anterior convolutions which form 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 281 

the frontal lobe. In man, on the contrary, the frontal 
convolutions are the first to appear, and those of the 
middle lobe are subsequently developed. 

"It is evident that when two organized beings follow 
an inverse course in their growth, the more highly 
developed of the two cannot have descended from the 
other by means of evolution. 

" Embryology next adds its evidence to that of anat- 
omy and morphology, to show how much in error they are 
who have fancied that Darwin's ideas would afford them 
the means of maintaining the monkey origin of man. 

" In the face of all these facts, anatomists, however 
they may differ on other points, are agreed on this, 
and Kave equally been led to the conclusion, that 
there is nothing that permits us to look at the brain 
of the ape as being like unto the brain of man smitten 
with an arrest of development, or, on the other hand, 
the brain of man as a development of that of the 
ape ; that the study of animal organism in general, and 
that of the extremities in particular, reveals, in addition 
to a general plan, certain differences in shape and 
arrangement which specify two altogether special and 
distinct adaptations, and are incompatible with the idea 
of any filiation ; that in their course of improvement 
and development, apes do not tend to become allied to 
man, and conversely the human type, when in a course 
of degradation, does not tend to become allied to the ape; 
finally, that no possible point of transition can exist 
between man and the ape, unless under the condition of 
inverting the laws of development. 



282 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

"Gratiolet's investigations of the brain of the ape, 
normal man, and small-brained individuals, have' shown 
that the similarities spoken of by evolutionists are purely 
fallacious. The human brain differs the more from 
that of the ape the less the former is developed, and an 
arrest of development could only exaggerate this natural 
difference. The idiot, however low he may be reduced, 
is not a beast ; he is nothing but a deteriorated man. 

"What, we may ask, is brought forward by the 
partisans of the simial origin of man in opposition to 
these general facts ? I have done my best to seek out 
the proofs alleged, but I everywhere meet with nothing 
but the same kind of argument — exaggerations of mor- 
phological similarities which no one denies; infeVences 
drawn from a few exceptional facts which are then 
generalized upon, or from a few coincidences in which 
the relations of cause and effect are a matter of supposi- 
tion; lastly, an appeal to possibilities from which 
conclusions of a more or less affirmative character are 
drawn. 

" The theory of the ape origin of man, therefore, is 
nothing but pure hypothesis, or rather nothing but a 
mere jeu d' esprit which everything proves utterly base- 
less, and in favor of which no solid fact has as yet been 
appealed to." 

Such is the conclusion reached by Professor Quatre- 
fages, and with whom substantially agree Vicq-d'Azyr, 
Series, Duvernoy, Gratiolet, Alix, Welker, Bert and 
Pruner-Bey, men whose scientific researches place them 
in the first rank of the Naturalists of the day. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 283 

3. Intellectual difference. — High as the bodily structure 
of Man places him above the Gorilla, his intellectual 
capacities place him immensely higher still. 

The mental powers of Man differ from those of the 
Gorilla and brutes in general, not simply in degree, as 
evolutionists claim, but in hind. Man possesses intel- 
lectual faculties, of which even the germs are entirely 
wanting in them. 

(1.) The Gorilla and other animals possess a system 
of nerves, and through which their bodies are endowed 
with Sensation — they can feel pain and pleasure, hunger 
and thirst, etc. 

(2.) The Gorilla and other animals have the power of 
Sensible Perception — they can see, hear, smell and taste. 

(3.) The Gorilla and other animals have the capacity 
of Association — they can and do associate danger, pain, 
or pleasure with certain objects, actions, or circum- 
stances. 

(4.) The Gorilla and other animals have the faculty 
of Memory, in a stronger or weaker degree. 

Under the governance and direction of Instinct, these 
suffice to guide them in all the duties and necessities of 
their lowly condition of being. All that we see in them, 
or witness them accomplishing, may be satisfactorily 
accounted for by these faculties only; no other power 
or powers need be called in to explain any of their 
doings. In addition to these, however, we find in Man 
two other and higher mental capacities, of which the 
most advanced brute is entirely destitute. 

(5.) Man possesses Self-consciousness — he is capable of 



284 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 



reflecting in thought upon the sensations and percep- 
tions which he receives from without, and of recognizing 
himself as perceiving and thinking. 

(6.) Man has the power of Reason — he is qualified to 
ask What? Why? When? Wherefore? concerning his 
sensations, perceptions and associations, and to infer 
conclusions from them. 

These last two kinds of mental action are voluntary 
and deliberate operations of the mind, and distinguish 
Intellect from Instinct. Mere brutes may possess the 
first four, and possess them in a high degree of perfec- 
tion ; they may have various feelings, and receive images 
of objects single or combined or in association, and act 
instinctively therefrom, in the manner most conducive 
to their welfare. But they are utterly incapable of the 
last two kinds of mental actions ; they cannot reflect on 
their own existence ; they cannot inquire into the nature 
or causes of objects or events ; they do not know that 
they know ; they do not know themselves in knowing. 
In other words, they are destitute of Reason. Hence the 
mental faculties of Man differ in kind from those pos- 
sessed by the highest type of animals. 

Had apes possessed even the germs of a rational 
nature, such germs would certainly long ere this have 
so developed as to have produced in their actions or 
mode of life unmistakable evidence of reason, seeing they 
have existed through such a prodigious lapse of time, 
for, according to Mr. Darwin, apes nearly as large as man 
ranged over the continent of Europe as far back as the 
Upper Miocene Period. But the descendants of those 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION 285 

apes are apes still, and nothing more than apes. If 
these animals possessed the faculty of reasoning — that 
is, if they were capable of reflection and comparison, of 
inquiring into causes and effects, of planning and com- 
bining efforts, in however humble a degree, they would 
certainly during these countless ages have made some 
progress in knowledge and action, some advancement 
in their mode of utterance and communication, some 
improvement in their habitations, in their way of secur- 
ing food, in their methods of defence and attack. But 
nothing of this kind appears to have taken place in their 
whole history; neither age, nor observation, nor expe- 
rience has advanced them one iota ; what they were in 
the Miocene Period they are in the present day. The 
very germ of reason being absent, they are uneduca- 
ble and unimprovable. In all the specially-selected 
instances of Mr. Darwin, when we sift and analyse 
them, we can find not a tittle of evidence to show that 
brutes possess the reasoning faculties, properly so called, 
in any degree however humble. 

Here, then, lies an immeasurable gulf between Man 
and the highest ape. Man — all men, however degraded 
their social condition, even Fuegians and Bushmen and 
Australians,* have self-consciousness and the power of 

* Mr. Darwin himself tells us that all the essential mental characters of 
civilized man are found in the very lowest races— "The American abo- 
rigines, Negroes, and Europeans differ as much from each other in Mind 
as any three races that can be named, yet I was incessantly struck, 
whilst living with the Fuegians on board the ' Beagle,' with the many 
little traits of character, showing how similar their minds were to ours ; 
and so it was with a full-blooded Negro with whom I happened once to 



286 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

reasoning ; they possess the gift of articulate and rational 
speech ; they have a perception of right and wrong, of 
truth and falsehood ; and they are capable of unlimited 
improvement in knowledge and action. 

To realize the enormous difference and distance be- 
tween Man and his nearest ally, the Gorilla, we need 
but view them in a few points of contrast. Man, by 
his intellect, clothed in warm and comely and often 
elegant garments; the Gorilla, devoid of intellect, re- 
maining covered only with the black coarse hair nature 
has given it. Man cultivating abundant fields of herbs 
and fruits and grain ; the Gorilla roaming in uncertain 
search for the wild productions of the forest. Man 
driving his harnessed horses, or riding in his steam car? 
riage, or sailing in his magnificent ship ; the Gorilla ever 
hobbling along on all-fours through woods and fens and 
thickets. Man dwelling in his clean and commodious 
house, often in a palace of marble and cedar ; the Gorilla 
crouching on a rude nest composed of a few twigs and 
leaves, exposed to dews and rains, winds and sunshine. 
Man counselling and concerting with his fellows, and 
uniting their strength in disciplined armies to defend 
their homes and to repel their enemies; the Gorilla, 
incapable of counsel or of concert, advancing to fight his 
battles singlehanded and alone. Man constructing his 
mighty engineries of war, his sword and rifle and cannon, 
his walled forts and floating batteries ; the Gorilla fur- 
be intimate. I have been deeply impressed with the close similarity 
between the men of all races in tastes, dispositions and habits."— De- 
scent of Man, Vol. L, PP. 223, 224. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 287 

nished only with his brawny arm and naked tusks. * 
Man enjoying the refining pleasures of argument and 
eloquence, of poetry and music, of statuary and paints 
ing ; studying the history, geography and geology of the 
globe ; understanding the chemistry of its materials and 
the laws of its elements ; calculating its dimensions and 
periods and velocities; measuring the distance of the 
sun and moon and stars; rising to a conception of 
the power, wisdom and goodness of the Great Creator 
of all, and offering Him the homage of adoration and 
praise : and the Gorilla — in total ignorance, in absolute 
unconsciousness, a perfect blank, in reference to all these. 

Such mental progress, such intellectual attainments, 
or anything that in the most distant degree resembles 
them, is an absolute impossibility to an ape or any other 
brute. The re-presentative faculties, or reasoning powers, 
being wanting in the animal, the very foundation for 
mental progress or improvement is wanting. There is 
no ground whereon to build, any more than there is in 
a man born blind to attain to the ideas of color, or one 
born deaf to those of the variations and harmonies of 
sounds. Of the power of abstraction the brutes are 
utterly destitute. The entire field of what we call 
knowledge lies absolutely beyond their reach. Let them 
be subjected to any process of discipline or instruction 
that can be imagined, through the whole period of their 

* The stories of the Gorillas going in troops, armed with clubs, to 
attack elephants, carry away women, etc., are repudiated both by Dr. 
Savage and Mr. Ford, our best authorities concerning these animals. 
The latter says that no well-informed native believes them, and that 
they are but tales told to children. 



288 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 



lives, and they cannot be put in possession of a single 
idea, literary or scientific — of proportion, order, simili- 
tude, time, space, succession, number, birth or death, 
obligation or duty, truth or falsehood, wisdom or 
argument. 

In view of such facts as the foregoing, we plainly see 
that between man and the highest ape there is a gulf 
that is literally immense. Even Mr. Darwin is forced 
to make the acknowledgment, " No doubt the difference 
in this respect is enormous." And Professor Huxley 
confesses that when we take the mind into comparison, 
there is between man and those beasts which stand 
nearest to him in anatomy, a difference so wide that 
it cannot be measured — "an enormous gulf" — "a diver- 
gence immeasurable" — and "practically infinite." And 
what is practically infinite, we may confidently add, is 
practically impossible ; the elevation of an ape, therefore, 
into a reasoning man is an impossibility. 

4. Difference in Language. — Of all the living tenants 
of our globe, Man alone can Talk ; no animal has ever 
Spolcen* in the proper sense of the term. Beasts and 
birds can utter various sounds expressive of their emo- 
tions — of their feelings of pleasure, anger, or terror; 
and some of them, as the Parrot, can even imitate the 
sounds of human speech ; but none of them can connect 
definite sounds with definite ideas. Articulate and 
rational language is peculiar to man, and that for the 
reason (among others) that man alone is endowed with 



* We except, <>f course, the Serpent in the garden, and the Ass that 
rebuked the madness of the prophet. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 289 

rational faculties, upon which language is dependent. 
Hence in every book on Logic, Language is quoted as a 
specific difference between Man and all other beings; 
thus Stuart Mill, " The attribute of being capable of 
understanding a language is a pi^oprium (peculiarity) 
of the species of man, since it follows from the attribute 
cf rationality." * 

One of the greatest of living linguists tells us that 
" there is in every language a certain class of words 
which may be called purely emotional. Most interjec- 
tions, many imitative words, belong to this class. If we 
deduct these, the rest of language, whether among our- 
selves or among the lowest barbarians, can be traced 
back to roots, and every one of these roots is the sign of 
a general concept or idea. This is the most important 
discovery of the Science of Language. Take any word 
you like, trace it back historically to its most primitive 
form, and you will find that it contains a predicative 
root, and that in this predicative root rests the connota- 
tive power of the word. Why is a stable called a stable ? 
Because it stands. Why is a saddle called a saddle ? 
Because you sit in it. Why is a road called a road ? 
Because we ride on it. Why is heaven called heaven ? 
Because it is heaved on high. In this manner every 
word, not excluding the commonest terms that must 
occur in every language, the names for father, mother, 
brother, sister, hand, foot, etc., have been traced back 
historically to definite roots, and every one of these roots 



19 



* Logic, Vol. I., p. 180. 



290 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

expresses a general concept. 1 ' * In like manner, " all 
words which express abstract ideas are borrowed from 
some material appearance. Bight means straight ; wrong 
means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; trans- 
gression, the crossing of a line ; supercilious, the raising 
of the eyebrow." f 

Thus the words composing language are derived from 
and are expressive of definite properties, relations, uses, 
etc.; but the emotional utterances of animals have no 
such roots, possess no such definite ideas or conceptions. 
The grunt of the Gorilla, we are told, as near as it can 
be put in English letters, is kh-ah ! Jch-ah ! The howl 
of the Chimpanzee is a hoarse ichooichoo ! And the cry 
of the Gibbon, goek, goeh, goek, goek, goeJc, lia ha ha ha 
haadaa ! Can the fertile and vivid imagination of the 
author of " The Descent of Man " suggest to us what 
might be the primitive roots of these euphonious ape- 
words ? or define to us the specific idea they involve and 
convey? or relate to us in a way "we cannot doubt" 
the process by which they have been improved into the 
nouns, verbs, and prepositions of human speech ? 

Evolutionists have never adduced a single instance of 
any animal speaking, or trying to learn to speak ; nor 
have they been able to explain in any consistent or 
sensible manner how the barrier of language, which 
divides man from all animals, might have been effectu- 
ally crossed. And the hopelessness of any such attempt 
is sufficiently evident from Mr. Darwin's futile efforts. 



* Mailer's Lectures on the Philosophy of Language, No. 2. f 76., No. 3. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 291 

In one place,* this writer attributes the faculty of speech 
in Man to his having acquired a higher intellectual 
nature; while in another place, f he attributes his 
higher intellectual nature to his having attained the 
faculty of speech. Thus he argues like the door upon 
its hinges, going and coming, but making no progress. 
And his other attempts to bridge over the chasm which 
separates instinctive cries from rational speech are cer- 
tainly among the most remarkable examples of ground- 
less speculations that ever found their way into print. 
See Yol. I., p. 51, etc. 

On the subject of Language no higher authority can 
be quoted than that of Professor Max Midler : " There 
is to my mind," says this distinguished scholar, "one 
difficulty which Mr. Darwin has not sufficiently appre- 
ciated. There is between the whole animal kingdom 
on one side, and man, even in his lowest state, on the 
other, a barrier which no animal has ever crossed, and 
that barrier is — Language. By no effort of the under- 
standing, by no stretch of the imagination, can I explain 
to myself how language could have grown out of any- 
thing which animals possess, even if we granted them 
millions of years for that purpose. If anything has a 
right to the name of specific difference, it is language 
as we find it in man, and in man only. I hold that 
nothing deserves the name of man except what is able 
to speak. Taking all that is called animal on one side, 
and man on the other, I must call it inconceivable that 



* Descent of Man, Vol. I., p. 53. 



t lb., Vol. II., p. 373. 



292 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

any known animal could ever develop language. Pro- 
fessor Schleicher, though an enthusiastic admirer of 
Darwin, observed once jokingly, but not without a deep 
meaning, ' If a pig were ever to say to me, I am a pig, 
it would ipso facto cease to be a pig.' This shows how 
strongly he felt that language was out of the reach of 
any animal, and the exclusive property of man." * 

M. Figuire, in his L Homme Primitif, holds the same 
view : " Intelligence and speech are really the attributes 
which constitute Man ; these are the qualities which 
make him the most complete being in creation, and the 
most privileged of God's creatures. Show me an ape 
who can speak, and then I will agree with you in 
recognizing it as a fact that man is nothing but an 
improved ape ! " 

" The philosopher," says Professor Max Miiller, " dis- 
covers in the line which separates rational from emo- 
tional language — in the roots of all languages — the true 
barrier between Man and Beast. I do not ask, like 
others, for a persuasive appeal from the throat of a 
nightingale, or for a gruff remonstrance from a gorilla, 
before I admit that they may be among the ancestors 
of the human race. Show me only one single root in the 
language of animals — show me one animal that has the 
power of forming roots, that can put one and one to- 
gether, and realize the simplest dual concept ; show me 
one animal that can think and say 7wo, and I should 
say that as far as language is concerned, we cannot 



* Lectures on Uic Philosophy of Language, No. 2, 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 293 

oppose Mr. Darwin's argument. Certain it is, that 
neither the power of language, nor the conditions under 
which alone language can exist, are to be discovered in 
any of the lower animals. 

" If language is what I hold it to be — the embodiment 
of conceptual thought, developed from roots, and based 
on concepts — then man cannot be the descendant of 
some lower animal, because no animal except man 
possesses the faculty, or the faintest germs of the faculty, 
of abstracting and generalizing, and therefore no animal, 
except man, could ever have developed what we mean 
by language. ... It becomes our duty to warn the 
valiant disciples of Mr. Darwin that before they can 
claim a real victory, before they can call man the 
descendant of a mute animal, they must lay a regular 
siege to a fortress which is not to be frightened into 
submission by a few random shots — the Fortress of 
Language — which, as yet, stands untaken and unshaken 
on the very frontier between the animal kingdom 
and man." * 

The learned author of The Genesis of the Earth and of 
Man, discoursing on the development of language, says, 
"We regard the first of our species, like the more 
advanced of his progeny, as endowed with a faculty of 
speech proportioned to his necessities. Our admiration 
must increase as we consider languages of higher and 
higher degrees of excellence ; but the rudest conceiva- 
ble kind of speech is marvellous enough to exalt the 



Lectures on the Philosophy of Language, ~No. 3. 



294 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

nature of man immeasurably above that of the brute 
creation." Page 226. 

5. Moral difference. — To the mental furniture of Man 
belongs a Moral Sense, which is to be found in no other 
earthly creature. He is endowed with Conscience, a 
power or capacity by which he instantly and irresistibly 
feels the difference between right and wrong. This is 
his noblest and crowning faculty. Its peculiar office 
is to arbitrate and direct all his other powers and pro- 
pensities according to rectitude, so far as that is appre- 
hended by his understanding. To the last line and 
limit of its enlightenment, its voice is always and every- 
where distinct and authoritative on the side of right, of 
truth and justice. "This sense," says Mackintosh, "has 
a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human 
action." Its authority is to the soul sacred and supreme. 
It is empowered to pronounce censure and applause, and 
to administer rewards and punishments. It follows up 
every act and exercise of man with instant approbation 
or condemnation; if its dictates are cheerfully and 
implicitly obeyed, it bestows in reward the pleasure of 
inward complacency and self-approbation ; but " if its 
impulses are resisted or disregarded, it inflicts the pain 
of a sense of guilt, or the feeling of remorse. 

Of the existence of such a faculty in the breast of man 
there is no doubt. Now the question is, Whence this 
Moral Sense to man ? Mr. Darwin does not hesitate to 
declare that it is the development of brutal instinct. 
" The first foundation or origin of moral sense," he says, 
"lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 295 

these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in 
the case of the lower animals, through Natural Selec- 
tion." * And he thus attempts to account for its growth 
and maturity into what we now call conscience : " The 
social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the 
society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sym- 
pathy with them, and to perform various services for 
them. . . . The social instincts would give the impulse 
to act for the good of the community. . . . Habit in the 
individual would ultimately play a very important part 
in guiding the conduct of each member. . . . Each indi- 
vidual would have an inward sense of possessing certain 
stronger or more enduring instincts, and others less 
strong or enduring, so that there would often be a 
struggle, which impulse should be followed, and satis- 
faction or dissatisfaction would be felt, as past impres- 
sions were compared during their incessant passage 
through the mind. In this case an inward monitor 
would tell the animal that it would have been better 
to have followed the one impulse rather than the other. 
. . . Thus any animal whatever, endowed with well- 
marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a 
moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual 
powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well 
developed, as in man."f 

It is obvious from these and other similar passages, 
as also from the examples and illustrations employed by 
Mr. Darwin, that he has never duly weighed what is 
involved in moral perception and judgment — in the idea 



* Descent of Man, Vol. II., p. 377. 



fJ6., Yol. I., p. 6S-70. 



296 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

of right and wrong, obligation and duty. His concep- 
tion of the moral sense, briefly expressed, seems to be — 
the prevalence of more enduring instincts over less persist- 
ent ones, the former being social instincts, the latter 
personal ones. But social instincts and social feelings 
are one thing, and a sense of right and wrong another 
thing, and quite as different as color is from shape, or 
sound from substance. No instinct, and no amount of 
kindly habits proceeding from instincts tend even in the 
remotest degree to account for conscience. Such habits 
may make the doing of such beneficial acts pleasant, 
and their omission painful ; but such feelings have essen- 
tially nothing whatever to do with the perception of 
right and torong, nor will the faintest incipient stage of 
the perception be accounted for by the strongest develop- 
ment of such sympathetic feelings. Liking to do acts 
which happen to be good, is one thing ; seeing that actions 
are good, whether we like them or not, is quite another. 

Again : If the " social instinct" were the real basis of 
the moral sense, the fact that society approved of any- 
thing would be recognized as the supreme sanction of 
that thing. But so far is this from being the case, that 
conscience pronounces its judgment on the doings of 
society itself, often condemns its proceedings, and some- 
times chooses death rather than submit to its demands. 
— Altogether, as Dr. McCosh has justly pronounced, 
" Mr. Darwin's theory of the origin of our moral ideas is 
one of the loosest and most unsatisfactory — indeed, one 
of the weakest ever propounded." * 



* Christianity and Positivism , p. 359. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 297 

This author, in the words before quoted, says that it 
is possible for "any animal to acquire a moral sense or 
conscience" — it would have been much more to the 
point, and infinitely more satisfactory, than all his 
incoherent reasoning, had he referred us to any species 
of animals that are passing through the process he 
describes, that are now acquiring in some faint or slow 
degree a moral sense or conscience. But this he has not 
pretended to do, for the all-sufficient reason we suppose, 
that no such animals are in existence. 

"It may safely be affirmed," says St. George Mivart, 
" that there is no trace in any brutes of any action simu- 
lating morality which are not explicable by the fear of 
punishment, by the hope of pleasure, or by personal 
affection. No sign of moral reprobation is given by any 
brute ; and yet had such existed in germ through Dar- 
winian abysses of past time, some evidence of its exist- 
ence must surely have been rendered perceptible through 
e survival of the fittest ' in other forms besides man, if 
that 6 survival' has alone and exclusively produced it 
in him."* 

The moral faculty is entirely wanting in all apes and 
all other brutes ; they possess nothing resembling a sense 
of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, of truth and 
falsehood. There is in them no inward monitor to 
approve or condemn their actions or conduct. No dog 
was ever seen compelled by inward smitings to return 
the meat he had stolen from the butchers stand, or ever 



* Genesis of Species, p. 211. 



298 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

known to lose his appetite and sleep through remorse 
for lacerating the playful infant that chanced to touch 
his ear. To all such feelings animals are utter strangers; 
they are in their nature incapable of the faintest idea 
of the morality or immorality of their doings. Virtue 
and vice, honesty and fraud, justice and mercy, are con- 
ceptions as far above them as are the starry heavens 
above the earth. 

Man only is a moral being. Man only acts from a 
sense of duty. "Duty!" exclaims Immanuel Kant,* 
" Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond 
insinuation^ flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by 
holding up thy naked laws in the soul, and so extorting 
for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience ; 
before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly 
they rebel ; whence thy original ? " We answer, From 
God, and from God direct. Conscience is a revelation 
of the Supreme Will in the human soul, and is designed 
to bring man not only into converse with goodness, but 
to relate him to it, as the power that should govern him 
in his daily conduct, and guide him to daily happiness. 
It is conscience that bestows upon human life all its 
sacredness and moral beauty ; and it is destitution of 
conscience that leaves the whole brute creation irrespon- 
sible, ignoble, and doomed at death to final extinction. 

If, now, we review what has been said of Man in com- 
parison with the Gorilla, and bring together all the 
differences enumerated and described under the five 



* Metaphysics of Ethics } p, 136. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 299 

foregoing heads — the difference in aspect and habits and 
expression, in the structure of the body and the forma- 
tion of the brains and muscles, in intellectual endow- 
ments and progress and achievements, in the use and 
advantages of articulate language, and in the high 
distinctions of a moral sense — we shall at once clearly 
see, and feel abundantly convinced that the Gulf — the 
Ocean — which separates them is truly "enormous," 
"immeasurable," and "practically infinite"; and con- 
sequently practically impassable. And yet, in the face 
of all this, we are asked, and that unsupported by a 
single well-established fact as to time or locality or means 
or method, to believe that some " hairy quadruped," some 
" ape-like creature," with no other guide than " chance," 
no other aid than " fortuitous variation," has conducted 
successfully a voyage occupying millions of years across 
this immense waste, and at length landed triumph- 
antly on the elevated and sunny plain of Intellect 
and Morality, from whence he now exercises dominion 
and authority over all that live or move or breathe 
in all the earth ! We are asked, we say, to believe all this 
— the demand, we must confess, utterly bankrupts all the 
credulity at our command. With all deference to author- 
ities, we must beg leave to say, that the feat seems to 
us as incredible, as Baron-Munchausen-like, as if we had 
been told that toward the close of the Miocene Period, a 
Baboon set out to undertake the flight of crossing the 
space which divides the Earth from the planet Saturn, 
and having accomplished the exploit, now sits com- 
placently on the resplendent arch of its inner Ring, 



300 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

surveying the wonders of the planetary landscape spread 
out beneath him. If we can receive the former, there 
is nothing to forbid us to believe the latter. 

Let us, however, devote a moment to glance at the 
style of reasoning or the character of the argument by 
which this extraordinary theory is recommended to our 
acceptance and belief. Thus it runs — " There must have 
been a series of forms graduating insensibly from some 
ape-like creature to man as he now exists, and it would 
be impossible to fix any definite point when the term 
Man ought to be used. But this is a matter of very 
little importance."* 

This certainly is what may be called " free and easy * 
science, and equally "free and easy" theology. 

" 'Tisn't easy to settle when Man became Man ; 
When the Monkey-type stopped and the Human began, 
As some very queer things were involved in the plan." 

" But this is a matter of very little importance !" 

Again : the qualifying term of the process — " insen- 
sibly." The reader will not fail to notice that this word 
begs the whole question. If we may be allowed this 
insensible-gradation argument, we can prove whatsoever 
we please. Two beings, or two objects, cannot be 
conceived so distinct, or so dissimilar, or so heterogene- 
ous, but give us " a few millions of years," and plenty of 
" environment/' we can, with the use of this kind of 
logic, prove the one to have been developed from the 
other; we can prove that the ant is a descendant of the 



* Descent qf Man, Vol. I., p. 226. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 301 

rhinoceros, and that the butterfly is the offspring of the 
whale — let us but " imagine " a descending series of suf- 
ficient length having existed between them, and the 
demonstration is complete ; in short, we can prove that 
the circle has been developed from the triangle, that two 
parallels can meet, and that a straight line may return 
upon itself and enclose a space. 

"This old fallacy," observes Max Miiller, "of first 
imagining a continuous scale, and then pointing out its 
indivisibility, affects more or less all systems of philos- 
ophy which ivish to get rid of specific distinctions. The 
admission of this insensible graduation would eliminate, 
not only the difference between ape and man, but like- 
wise between black and white, hot and cold, a high and 
low note in music ; in fact, it would do away with the 
possibility of all exact and definite knowledge, by 
removing those wonderful lines and laws of nature, 
which change the Chaos into a Kosmos, the Infinite into 
the Finite, and which enable us to count, to tell, and to 
know." 

Leaving the argument, let us now inquire after the 
"Series." This began, we are told, with an offshoot 
of the " Old World Monkeys." This ape-like creature 
had its offspring, more or less ; these, in like manner, 
had their offsprings ; and these again had theirs ; and so 
on. Now, we wish to ask, did the successive generations 
forming these lines of descent all travel gradually toward 
the goal of humanity, or only one of them ? 

If all made upward progress, then, their progress being 
by "fortuitous variation," some would advance slower 



302 THE ORY OF E VOL UTIOM. 

and some faster than others ; so that, at length, as the 
foremost emerged into distinct manhood, others would 
be short of that point, some, say, one-tenth, some two- 
tenths, some three-tenths, and so on all the way down to 
those which had made no perceptible progress. Hence 
man should have found co-existing with him a regular 
gradation of beings, descending on every side from him- 
self down to the ape. But no such gradation exists; 
between man and his nearest living ally is an " immeas- 
urable gulf." 

If it be said that only one series ascended toward man- 
hood ; then, in this case, that one in the course of its up- 
ward progress must have thrown out branches that were 
continually in advance of the previous ones, and others 
in advance of these, and so on all the way to pure man- 
hood ; we should, therefore, even from the single series, 
still have among us at the present day a gradation of 
animals down to the ape-like creature. But by common 
consent no such a graduated series is to be found. 

If, to escape from this difficulty, it be said, as Darwin 
does, that all the branches of this series together with 
their offsprings have perished, except the single one that 
ripened into manhood — then we would ask, Since each 
generation in the series of man's progenitors, from the 
" hairy quadruped " to man himself, must have been in 
advance and better fitted to maintain its position in the 
world, than any which preceded it, how perished all 
these, while mere monkeys, which had made no progress 
at all, still survive and flourish? Here, Mr. Darwin in 
his efforts to escape from Scylla falls into Charybdis — 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 303 

according to his theory, the fittest should have survived; 
but according to his facts, the fittest have perished. 

The intermediate series of animal forms between Man 
and the ape have perished and become extinct, we are 
told — here the very thing to be proved is gratuitously 
assumed; we must have evidence that the series ever 
existed, before we can believe that it has perished.^ 
But admitting for the moment, that they have all 
perished, we ask, how is this accounted for? We 
demand that some reason be assigned for such a remark- 
able occurrence. The number of forms in that series 
must have been exceeding great — the more " insensible " 
the process, the greater the number of forms. Now we 
ask Darwinians to account for this fact, for fact it must 
be, if their hypothesis be true, that all these myriads of 
intermediate forms, without a single exception, have 
become extinct, while the first and the last links, the 
ape and the man, still survive. Why have we no species 
of living creature half way, or some other part of the 
way, between these ? Why is not the vast gap occupied 
by more or less of these supposed numerous intermediate 
forms, seeing that many feebler animals, that must have 
been contemporary with every one of these links, still 
live and multiply on the earth ? To this question they 
can return no satisfactory answer whatever — here their 
theory breaks down — for the assumption they make to 
support it, they can offer no reason, nor the shadow of 
reason. 

If it is still insisted that they have perished and 
become extinct, then we ask for their bones, or at least 



304 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

for their fossils. Can these be produced ? None of them. 
What reply then is made to the demand for them? 
None other than this evasive one, "The discovery of 
fossil remains has always been an extremely slow and 
fortuitous process." Have no fossil remains, then, of 
any kind been found which can be produced, in support 
of the theory, either of the immediate or remote pro- 
genitors of man? Let Mr. Darwin answer — "The 
great chasm between Man and his nearest allies cannot 
be bridged over by any extinct or living species."* Thus 
the supporters of the development hypothesis fail, not 
only to produce the organic cJiain, which they say con- 
nects man with the ape, but they cannot produce even a 
fossil link of that chain. 

It is entirely obvious, hence, that we are warranted to 
conclude, that this " intermediate series of animal forms 
between Man and the ape" never existed, save in the 
imagination of those who hold to it; and that the whole 
train of reasoning by which it is attempted to support 
this theory is illogical, inconclusive and unsatisfactory 
to the last degree. 

There are absolutely no facts either among the devel- 
opments of Geology, or in the written History of the past, 
or in the actual Experience of the present, that can be 
referred to in proof of the descent of man from an ape- 
like creature. There is nothing within the compass of 
human observation or research, to indicate that man, as 
we travel backwards into the past, will be found to 



* Descent of Man, Vol. I., p. 200. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 305 

descend toward the ape in mind or body. We of the 
present, with all our boasted advantages, do not possess 
any native mental powers superior to those of the 
earliest periods of human history. Neither Mr. Darwin 
nor Professor Huxley, we presume, would venture to 
affirm that Seneca, Marcus Antonius, Cleanthes, Aris- 
totle, Plato, Homer, and many others, were not in this 
respect fully abreast of ourselves. And if we recede far 
beyond the utmost limit of the historic period, and 
examine the most ancient human remains that have 
thus far been discovered, we shall find no material 
diminution in the size of the cranium or brain-case of 
men. A Swiss skull of what is called the " Stone Age," 
found in the lake dwelling of Meilen, corresponds 
exactly to that of a Swiss youth of the present day. 
The celebrated Neanderthal skull exhibits a fair circum- 
ference and capacity, fully equal to those given by 
Morton to the Polynesian races of the present day ; and 
Professor Huxley* makes the candid acknowledgment 
in regard to it, that, " in no sense can the Neanderthal 
bones be regarded as the remains of a human being inter- 
mediate between Men and Apes." The Engis skull, 
doubtless the very oldest known, and which according 
to Sir John Lubbock there seems no doubt was really 
contemporary with the Mammoth and the Cave Bears, 
is yet perfectly human in all its proportions. " Its 
measurements," says Huxley, " agree well with those of 
some European skulls. And assuredly there is no mark 



* Man's Place in Nature, p. 181. 

20 



306 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

of degradation about any part of its structure. It is, in 
fact, a fair average human skull, which might have 
belonged to a philosopher. In conclusion, I may say, 
that the fossil remains of Man hitherto discovered do not 
seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to the ape 
form."* 

The following passage occurs in the very able and 
interesting paper read by Principal Dawson before the 




Outlines of the Engis Skull. 

The dotted line represents that of a European, a. The glabella, b. The occipital protuberance 
c. The auditory foramen of the Engis Skull. 



Evangelical Alliance at its recent meeting in the city of 
New York : 

"The physical characters of the known specimens of 
primitive men are unfavorable to the doctrine of evolu- 
tion. Theories of derivation would lead us to regard the 
most degraded races of men as those nearest akin to the 
primitive stock ; and the oldest remains of man should 



* JfeTon'a Place in Nature, pp. 1S1-1S3. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 307 

present decided approximation to his simian ancestors. 
But the fact is quite otherwise. The skulls of the most 
ancient European men known to us are comparable with 
those of existing races, and further, the great stature and 
grand development of the limbs in those of the most 
ancient skeletons which are entire or nearly so, testify 
to a race of men more finely constituted physically than 
the majority of existing Europeans. The skull found by 
Schmerling in the cave of Engis, associated with the 
bones of the mammoth and other extinct animals, is of 
good form and large capacity, and presents characters 
which, though recalling those of some European races, 
also resemble those of the native races of America. The 
bones described by Christy and Sartet, from the cave of 
Cro-Magnon, in France, represent a race of great stature, 
strength and agility, and with a development of brain 
above the European average ; but the lines of the face 
show a tendency to the Mongolian and American visage, 
and the skeletons present peculiarities in the bones of 
the limbs found also in American races, and indicating, 
probably, addiction to hunting and a migratory and 
active life. These Cro-Magnon people lived at an 
epoch when France was overgrown with dense forests, 
when the mammoth probably lingered in its higher 
districts, and when a large part of the food of its people 
was furnished by the reindeer. Still more remarkable, 
perhaps, is the fossil man, as he has been called, of Men- 
tone, recently found in a cave in the South of France, 
buried under cavern accumulations which bespeak a 
great antiquity, and associated with bones of extinct 



308 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

mammalia and with rudely-fashioned implements of flint. 
It appears from the careful descriptions of Dr. Rurere 
that this man must have been six feet high and of vast 
muscular power, more especially in the legs, which 
present the same American peculiarities already referred 
to in the Cro-Magnon skeletons. The skull is of great 
capacity, the forehead full, and the face, though broad 
and Mongolian and large-boned, is not prognathous, and 
has a high facial angle. The perfect condition of the 
teeth, along with their being worn perfectly flat on the 
crowns, would imply a healthy and vigorous constitution 
and great longevity, with ample supplies of food, prob- 
ably vegetable, while the fact that the left arm had 
been broken and the bone healed, shows active and 
possibly warlike habits. Such a man, if he were to rise 
up again among us, might perhaps be a savage, but a 
noble savage, with all our capacity for culture, and pre- 
senting no more affinity to apes than we do. 

"I have referred to European facts only, but it is 
remarkable that in America the oldest race known to us 
is that of the ancient Alleghans and Totheans and their 
allies, and that these, too, were men of large stature and 
great cranial development, and agricultural and semi- 
civilized, their actual position being not dissimilar from 
that attributed to the earliest cultivators of the soil in 
the times of Adam or Noah. 

"So far the facts bearing on the physical and mental 
condition of primitive man are not favorable to evolution, 
and are more in accordance with the theory of Divine 
Creation, and with the statements of the sacred record. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 309 

" With reference to these pre-historic men, known to 
us only by their bones and implements, it may not be 
possible to discover their belief as to the unity of God; 
but we have distinct evidence on the other points. On 
the oldest bone implements — some of them made of the 
ivory of the now extinct mammoth — we find engraved 
the tokens or Manitou marks of their owners, and in 
some cases scratches or punctures indicating the offer- 
ings made or successes and deliverances experienced 
under their auspices. With regard to the belief in 
immortality, perhaps also in a resurrection, the Mentone 
man — whose burial is perhaps the oldest known to us — 
was interred with his fur robes and his hair dressed as 
in life, with his ornaments of shell wampum on his head 
and limbs, and with a little deposit of oxide of iron, 
wherewith to paint and decorate himself with his appro- 
priate emblems. Nor is he alone in this matter. Similar 
provision for the dead .appears at Cro-Magnon and the 
cave of Bruniguel. Thus the earliest so-called palaeo- 
lithic men entertained belief in God and in immor- 
tality, perhaps the dim remains of primitive theism, 
perhaps the result of their perception of the invisible 
things of God in the works that He had made." 

So far, then, as any discoveries of this nature have yet 
been made, they plainly indicate that ivhat man now is 
man always has been; and that he has ever been sepa- 
rated from all brutes by a gulf practically infinite. 

Upon what, then, it may be asked, do Mr. Darwin and 
his followers ground their arguments in support of 
their theory of Man's descent ? Mainly on resemblances 



310 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

between certain parts and functions of the human body to 
corresponding ones in animal bodies. These resemblances 
are for the most part distant, often faint or doubtful, and 
not unfrequently merely fanciful ; while the inferences 
drawn from them are altogether unwarranted. This will 
be sufficiently evident from the following examples. 

Every kind of beast originates in an ovule, Man also 
is developed from an ovule ; these two kinds of ovules 
are so diminutive (man's not exceeding the one hundred 
and twenty-fifth part of an inch in diameter), and so 
similar in their composition, that the eye cannot dis- 
tinguish them : from this the astounding leap is made 
at once to the conclusion that " the human ovule differs 
in no respect from the ovules of other animals." * This 
inference, it will be observed, is based, not on the proved 
identity of the ovules, but on man's ignorance, or his 
inability to detect the difference, and is, therefore, worth- 
less. Here, indeed, is similarity, but not identity ; for, 
if such ovules differed " in no respect," then that of a 
donkey under certain conditions might turn out an 
ape, or an elephant. But such a thing has never been 
known ; throughout the animal kingdom every ovule 
develops into a creature after its own kind ; and this 
wnfailing uniformity is a demonstration that the human 
ovule does differ, and differ essentially from those of all 
other animals. 

The unborn infant about the sixth month puts forth 
over the whole body a growth of very fine soft hairs, 



* Descent of Man, Vol. I., p. 14. 



THEOR Y OF E VOL UTION. 311 

called lanugo ; this, we are told, " must be considered 
to be the rudimental representative of the first perma- 
nent coat of hair in those animals that are born hairy." * 
The female as well as the male foetus is furnished with 
this lanugo on the face, " especially round the mouth ; 
and this indicates that we are descended from a pro- 
genitor of which both sexes were bearded." f If man 
has scattering hairs on his body both as an embryo and 
an adult, does it necessarily follow that he is indebted 
for them to some hairy quadruped ? We are shut up 
to no such conclusion ; why may not man have hair as 
independent of the quadruped, as the quadruped of man ? 
Are we to conclude from the " fine wool-like hair " which 
covers the tender shoots of many a giant tree when they 
first spring up from the ground, that these trees are the 
descendants of some ancient trees that were covered 
with " a permanent coat of hairs ? 

Consenting for the instant to the above idea, we can- 
not refrain from asking, How came man to lose his hairy 
coat ? Well, it is first suggested that it might have been 
through the action of the sun, while living in a hot 
climate. J But this supposition is found to lead to the 
puzzle, how came the sun to spare the head, the most 
exposed part, where hair still grows luxuriantly ? From 
this difficulty, however, we are finally extricated by 
the intervention of " Sexual Selection." Incipient man 
gradually changed in his taste, and came to fancy and 
choose mates with less and less hairy bodies; hence 



* Descent of Man, Vol. L, p. 25. f lb., Vol. II. , p. 302. J 16., Vol. I., p. 143. 



312 THE ORY OF E VOL UTION. 

incipient woman came to regard nudity as being orna- 
mental, and under the influence of her instinctive desire 
to please, found her hair growing " small by degrees, and 
beautifully less ! " "As our female progenitors gradually 
acquired this new character of nudity, they must have 
transmitted it in an almost equal degree to their young 
offspring of both sexes. There is nothing surprising in 
a partial loss of hair having been esteemed as orna- 
mental by the ape-like progenitors of man." * But the 
comical part of this imaginary piece of natural history is, 
that the whole of the grotesque idea has been suggested 
by the very noticeable fact that, " in several species of 
monkeys, a large surface of the posterior end of the body 
has been denuded of hair, that the vivid color of the skin 
should be more fully displayed — this surface extends as 
the animal approaches maturity ! " f Remarks here are 
inadmissible — we may, however, add the statement of 
St. George Mivart, " No zoological facts known to me 
afford the slightest basis for this bizarre hypothesis." % 

Some animals, such as cats and rats, have long hairs 
about the mouth, which serve them as feelers ; and Mr. 
Darwin, having been informed that some men have a 
few hairs in their eyebrows much longer than the others, 
reaches this important inference therefrom, to wit, that 
"these long hairs (in the eyebrows) apparently represent 
the vibrissas, which are used as organs of touch by many 
of the lower animals." || Admirable logic! Some per- 
sons have a few long hairs in their eyebrows, which they 

* Descent of Man, Vol, II., p. 860. fib., Vol. I., p. 60. 
X I*<>2>. Sci. Iu vit w. || Descent of Man, Vol. L, p. 25. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 313 

do not use as feelers ; cats and rats have long hairs on 
their upper Up, which they do use as feelers; man, 
therefore, is descended from the same prknal stock as 
cats and rats ! 

Animals are subject to such diseases as hydrophobia, 
variola, glanders, etc. ; man also may be affected by the 
same diseases; the inference, therefore, made is, that 
their tissues and blood are similar, and must have pro- 
ceeded from the same origin.* One and the same evil 
may affect and destroy a variety of animals ; this, there- 
fore, according to the above argument, is evidence that 
all these animals have come from one and the same 
progenitor ! Would it not have been equally good reason- 
ing to say, Animals can be burnt, or frozen, or poisoned, 
or starved ; man can be burnt, or frozen, or poisoned, or 
starved; therefore man and animals must have come 
from the same ancestor? 

Animals can twitch their hides as norses and cattle 
do to drive away troublesome flies ; man can do some- 
thing very similar, he can raise his eyebrows, wrinkle 
his forehead, and sometimes slightly move his scalp ; and 
this power in man is forthwith put down as "a remnant" 
of that which is still found in full force in the animal,f 
when every mans common sense tells him that this is a 
part of "the power of the face" as much as that which 
enables him to put on the expression of laughter, grief, 
anger, or terror. 

The jaws of certain beasts, such as the wild boar, the 



* Descent of Man, Vol. I., pp. 11, 12. f lb., Vol. I., p. 19. 



314 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

tiger, and the gorilla, are armed with four large and 
long teeth, or tusks, for holding and tearing their prey ; 
and man has four teeth in the same relative positions, 
which, though somewhat pointed in form, are of even 
length with all the rest ; from this the startling conclusion 
is reached that " the early male progenitors of man were 
probably furnished with great canine teeth, which served 
them as weapons for fighting and tearing their enemies."* 
This is about as legitimate an inference as that we have 
had from the long hairs in a man's eyebrows. 

In about one man in ten thousand a little thickening, 
or rounded fulness, on close inspection, may be observed 
on the inside margin of the ear; this, it is gravely said, 
" we may safely conclude is a vestige of formerly pointed 
ears, which occasionally reappears in man." f And Mr. 
Darwin saw one man who could draw his ears forward 
a trifle, and another who could draw them as much 
backwards. The evident significance of all this, we are 
given to understand, is, that man in a former period of 
his history walked about with long pointed ears, and 
" that he had the faculty of erecting them, and of direct- 
ing them to different points of the compass." J Mr. Dar- 
win further instructs us on this point, that our ears 
acquired their present neat form by " folding inwardly 
the margin;" but who the skilful and tasty operator was, 
that initiated this improvement, we are not informed. 
He also conveys the suggestion that "probably by often 
touching our ears, and thus directing our attention to 



* Descent of Man, Vol. L, pp. 121, 122. t Zb., Vol. I., p. 23. 
t Descent of Jfon, Vol. I., pp. 20-22. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 315 

them, we could, by repeated trials, recover our lost 
power of moving them." * As this power, under many 
circumstances, might be of advantage, some one has 
suggested that our Schoolmasters would do well occa- 
sionally to exercise their pupils in this direction ; and 
that, " Erect your ears, Boys," might come in as a part 
of the daily drill. 

Once more : " The os coccyx in man," that is, the 
lower extremity of his spine, " is short, usually including 
only four vertebrae ; and these are in a rudimental con- 
dition. This, though functionless as a tail, plainly repre- 
sents this part in other vertebrate animals." f In what 
way this appropriate and convenient terminus of the 
back-bone proves, or even intimates, that it once ex- 
tended into a long tail, we are not able to conceive. It 
is a fact, Mr. Darwin's quoted authority to the contrary 
notwithstanding, that the os coccyx in man has nothing 
belonging to it like a tail ; " it has no joints, nor has it 
muscles that can move it, as a tail must have." J If 
man ever had a tail, we beg to know what has become 
of it. Mr. Darwin owns that "so far as he is aware, 
no explanation of this loss has ever been given." But 
why is not that offered long ago by Lord Monboddo a 
good one, " Man rubbed off his tail by sitting on it?" 

So trivial, so uncertain, so fanciful, are the instances 
of resemblance which Mr. Darwin introduces, and so 
unwarrantable are his inferences from them, that one is 
amazed they could aid him in justifying, even to his 



* Descent of Man, Yol. I., pp. 20-22. t lb., Yol. I., p. 28. 

X Homo \s. Darwin, p. 70. 



316 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

own mind, the astounding conclusion that Ape is father 
to the Man ! His fondness for his favorite theory seems 
to have enervated his natural power of reasoning, and 
to have rendered him blind and insensible to everything 
that tells against it. " He has allowed himself," says 
an anonymous writer, "to become so enamored of 
the venerable pair of hairy quadrupeds, with tails and 
pointed ears, from whom he thinks himself descended, 
that he skips over mountains more impassable than the 
Himalayas, and flies on the wings of imagination across 
separating and unfathomable abysses, that he may 
embrace them." 

Mr. Darwin, indeed, speaks of " the Creator and Ruler 
of the universe," but his theory does not recognize Him 
as such — gods of his own creation are made to usurp 
and occupy His throne. " Darwin's theory," as Dr. Vogt 
says, u ignores a personal Creator, and his direct inter- 
ference in the transformation and creation of species, 
there being no sphere of action for such a being. Given the 
first starting-point, a first organism, all existing organ- 
isms are subsequently by natural selection developed 
from it in a continuous manner through all geological 
periods, by the simple laws of transmission. There arise 
no new species by any creative interference. Even man 
is neither a distinct creation,, formed in a special manner, 
and different from all other animals, nor provided with 
a special *<>)iL nor endowed with a divine breath of lite; 
lie is only the highest product of a progressive natural 

selection, and descends from the simious group standing 
next to man. 1 ' Darwin employs such words as " con- 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 317 

trivance," " purpose," " adaptation," and " design ; " but 
he uses them, as Mivart truly observes, in "a mere 
figurative sense — as metaphors, and nothing more." He 
talks also of "laws" — the "law of variation," and the 
" law of natural selection ; " but all that he can mean 
by the term is the merest chance or accident, though he 
disclaims this ; for what are the main causes of " varia- 
tions?" These — the character of the mate with which 
an animal may happen to consort, the soil or climate 
to which whim may happen to lead it, or its enemies 
happen to drive it. And "natural selection" — what is 
the naked fact covered by this phrase? The chance 
issues of chance encounters among beasts, or birds, or 
other animals — we say chance issues, for among brutes 
as among men, "the battle is not always to the 
strong, nor the race always to the swift." Now can 
anything be well imagined more purely accidental 
or fortuitous than such matings, whims, wanderings 
and fightings among irrational creatures? And yet 
these are "the laws" by which the world has been 
framed ! 

Indeed, the very existence of the human race itself, 
according to this theory, is but an accident. That the 
Ascidian Tadpoles, after passing through the revolutions 
of millions on millions of years, at last developed into 
monkeys and monkeys into men, depended upon as 
many millions of contingencies. " We have given to 
man a pedigree of prodigious length," says the great 
Seer of Development; "if a single link in this chain 
had never existed, man would not have been exactly 



318 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

what he now is." * To go no further back — If the bodily 
structure of some member of the Old World monkey 
family had not happened to be more plastic than the 
rest — if that member had not chanced to meet with a 
like plastic mate — if these had produced no posterity, 
or posterity not inheriting their own qualities, or had 
their posterity been cut off — if there had not occurred 
a change in the physical conditions of the region they 
inhabited, rendering necessary a change in their manner 
of procuring food — if they had not become less arborial 
in their habits — if when they forsook the trees they 
had not begun to walk on their hind limbs instead of 
going on all-fours — if any one of these contingencies had 
not occurred, the human race had never existed ; there 
would still have been in the world nothing higher or 
better than the hairy quadruped, with tail and pointed 
ears, climbing and living in the trees of the forest; man, 
" the wonder and glory of the universe," had not come 
forth to subdue the earth, or to fill it with monuments 
of his skill and industry, or to adorn it with altars and 
temples erected to the glory of its Divine Builder. 

Hence, according to Mr. Darwin, mankind are a for- 
tuitous Race, living in a fortuitous world. And what 
is this but practical Atheism, and Atheism of the most 
dreary and hopeless kind? If this theory does not 
expressly deny God, it effectually ignores God. Its 
tendency is to remove the Divine Being entirely from 
the view of man, and to lead to disbelief in His provi- 



* Descent of .V«n, Vol. I., p. 205. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 319 

dence, in His having any connection with or interest in 
human affairs. The whole living world is given up by 
this hypothesis to the blind power of " fortuitous varia- 
tion/' and to the hard, unsympathetic, and relentless 
rule of " natural selection." The system admits not of 
the regard or the notice of a loving Father in heaven ; 
of no beneficent providence over man or brute. For 
anything that it allows the Creator to do in the realm 
of material nature, or in the kingdom of animated 
beings, it might as well have been written, "God has 
nothing to do with the world." On this hypothesis, 
Divine benevolence has never been exercised toward 
man; Divine revelation is a fable; salvation from sin 
and misery is a myth ; and the hope of immortality but 
the illusion of a dream. 

To call in the agency of the Creator to account for 
any of the phenomena, or for the existence of any of the 
organized beings we find in the world, is very distaste- 
ful to the advocates of Development ; they openly and 
strenuously object to it; it is put down as unscientific, 
and deemed derogatory to the standing of a true Student 
of Nature. Professor Huxley, speaking of the succession 
of animals upon the earth, says, " When we look at this 
wonderful history, and ask what it means, it is only a 
paltering with words if you are offered the reply — 6 They 
were so created.' Notwithstanding all this, we discover 
that Mr. Darwin himself has committed, in one instance 
at least, this very ' unscientific ' sin. In order to obtain 
a starting-point for his system of animal development, 
he is constrained to resort to Divine agency; for he 



320 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

speaks in one place of 6 life having been originally 
breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or one ; ' and 
in another place of 6 animals having descended from at 
most four or five progenitors/"* If, therefore, it be 
thus admitted that the immediate agency of the Creator 
has been concerned in the production of four or five 
different kinds of animals, why not in four or five hun- 
dred, or even in as many as there are of distinct species 
in existence ? There is nothing more unscientific or 
improbable in the latter admission than in the former. 
And if it be confessed that the Creator condescended 
to put forth his power directly and immediately for the 
production of the first and lowest and simplest of the 
earth's living tenants, what ground is there to deny, or 
even to doubt, that He exercised his power in a similar 
manner for the creation of Man, the highest and noblest 
of all terrestrial creatures? On Mr. Darwin's own ad- 
mission, therefore, there is nothing incredible, nothing 
improbable in the Scripture statement that God himself 
formed man, and breathed into his nostrils the breath 
of life, and made him a living soul. 

Mr. Alfred Wallace, one of the authors of the theory 
of development, makes concessions still more explicit 
and decisive. He acknowledges even in regard to man's 
body, that Natural Selection " alone " could not have 
produced it — that an action took place in its formation 
"different" from that by which brute forms were evolved 
—and that there is evidence of the action of an " over- 



* (Jriyin of Sjxcics, pp. 424, 11*9. 



THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 321 

ruling Intelligence " in the evolution of the human form 
Divine. And to the idea that the human mind has 
been derived from that of the brute, he urges objections 
drawn from the origin of some of man's mental faculties, 
such as " the capacity to form ideal conceptions of space 
and time, of eternity and infinity — the capacity for intense 
artistic feelings of pleasure, in form, color and compo- 
sition — and for those abstract notions of form and num- 
ber which render geometry and arithmetic possible;" 
he also urges similar objections grounded on the origin 
of the moral sense or conscience. This writer further 
states, that in his opinion, man is to be placed " apart," 
as not only the head and culminating point of the grand 
series of organic nature, but as in some degree a new 
and distinct order of being. * And what is all this but 
a virtual admission that Man, after all, both as to his 
Body and Mind, is, as the Bible declares, a creation of 
God — the product of a distinct and immediate act of 
infinite power and wisdom ? 

Mr. St. George Mivart, also an evolutionist, but of a 
somewhat different school from Darwin, while he holds 
that " the body of man was not an absolute creation, but 
evolved from pre-existing material, symbolized by the 
term 6 dust of the earth/ by the operation of secondary 
laws" — affirms that "his soul, on the other hand, was 
created in quite a different way, not by any pre-existing 
means, external to God Himself, but by the direct action 
of the Almighty, symbolized by the term ' breathing/ 



* See Natural Selection, pp. 324-368. 

21 



322 THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 

the very form adopted by Christ when conferring the 
supernatural powers and graces of the Christian dis- 
pensation." * Here again, this evolutionist like the 
two preceding, after a whole volume of discussions and 
illustrations of his special views of Development, finds 
himself at the close of it constrained to admit the sum 
and substance of the whole Scripture account of man's 
creation. 

From the Darwinian Hypothesis, then, the Christian 
has nothing to fear — nothing, indeed, to give him one 
anxious or uneasy thought as to the ground of his faith. 
The theory is powerless to affect the Sacred Record — its 
author has utterly failed to make out the descent of 
Man from the Ape. The Scripture history of man — of 
his creation in holiness, of his fall through disobedience, 
and of his redemption through grace — remains unmoved, 
unshaken. This daring and desperate assault, like a 
hundred others before it, to undermine the Holy Book, 
has been made but to share the fate of the wave that 
madly rushes on the rock-bound coast — to be dashed 
into spray and forced to retire, leaving behind it not a 
trace of its violence. The foundation of God standeth 
sure as ever, and in this additional discomfiture of the 
enemies of the Word, the believer may find another con- 
firmation of the assurance given, The GATES OF HELL 
SHALL NOT PREVAIL AGAINST IT. 



* Qi nesia Species, p. 300. 



Ethnology 

AND 

The Unity of Mankind. 



In the centre of Athens, in the midst of matchless monuments of human skill, 
and confronting the learning and the pride which exalted the Athenian above 
every race in the world, Paul boldly proclaimed the distasteful truth, that " God 
hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the 
earths — Fraser. 

323 




I. Points of Difference in the human Races: Difference in Skulls, 
Color, and Hair. 



II. Points of Identity in the Races : Identity in Organizations, Func- 
tions, Periods, Intellectual and Moral Faculties, Languages, 
Customs, etc. 

324 



Ethnology 

AND 

The Unity of Mankind. 



THNOLOGY is a science of quite recent 
origin, and treats of National Distinctions. 
It differs from History in that it deals 
chiefly with the effects of physical influ- 
ences on man, such as those of climate, 
soil and food; it also goes back beyond 
the dawn of history, by reasoning from 
effect to cause. In this respect it is somewhat analogous 
to Geology. It deals with the peoples that inhabit the 
earth's surface in a similar way to that which Geology 
pursues with regard to the strata that compose it. Its 
object is to determine the affinities, relations and origin 
of the nations of the world, by investigating and tracing 
their movements and migrations long before the ex- 
istence of written records. 

The most cursory survey of the earth suffices to show 
that its human inhabitants are greatly diversified in 
their general aspect and character, in the stature and 

325 




326 ETHNOLOGY. 

symmetry of their bodies, in the complexion of their 
skin and the quality of their hair, in the form of the 
head and the cast of the features, in the languages 
they speak and the habits of life which they follow. 
Attempts have been made to reduce this vast variety 
into a few general classes ; but the number of these 
classes has* varied with the progress of information, and 
sometimes according to the favorite theories of the 
classifiers. The whole Race has been comprehended, 
and pretty fully described, under the following heads, by 
Blumenbach ; though a somewhat different classification 
is now generally adopted. 

The Caucasian Variety. — The characters of this class 
are : a white skin, varied by a florid tint, or inclining 
to brown ; hair black, or of a light color, generally soft 
and waving. The face oval and straight, with expanded 
forehead, and generally large skull, narrow nose, and 
small mouth. The moral feeling and the intellect are 
of the highest order. This variety comprehends the 
Persians, Assyrians, Arabians, Jews, Phoenicians, in- 
habitants of Asia Minor, and all the nations of Europe 
(excepting the Fins), together with the Egyptians, Moors, 
and Abyssinians, in Africa. 

The Mongolian Variety, — In this division, the skin is 
commonly of a sallow or olive tint, and in some cases 
nearly yellow; the hair is black, long and straight, 
seldom curling; the beard usually scanty; the iris black; 
the nose is broad and short, and the cheek bones broad 
and Hat. with salient zygomatic arches; the skull is 

oblong, but flattened at the sides so as to give an appear- 



ETHNOLOGY. 327 

ance of squareness; the forehead is low. The intellect 
is by no means defective, but the moral character is 
decidedly low. This class is mainly made up of the 
Mongol Tartar tribes. The Fins, Laplanders and Esqui- 
maux also appear to be a remnant of some primitive 
Mongolian people; their peculiarities probably are owing 
to their locations. 

Ethiopia or African Variety. — The black skin and 
woolly hair of the Negro form the well-known char- 
acter of this race. The forehead is low and retreat- 
ing, and the lower part of the face projecting like a 
muzzle; the nose is thick and flat, and the lips thick. 
This class comprises all the inhabitants of Africa, except 
those above mentioned as being Caucasian. 

American Variety. — This includes all the aboriginal 
tribes of the continent of America, except the Esqui- 
maux. A reddish-brown complexion; long, black, lank 
hair ; deficient beard ; eyes black and deep-set ; receding 
brow ; high cheekbones ; prominent aquiline nose ; small 
skull, with the apex high and the back part flat ; large 
mouth and tumid lips ; with fine symmetrical frames of 
middle height, form the chief physical characteristics of 
this race. 

Malay Variety. — These are characterized by tawny or 
dark brown skins ; coarse, black hair ; large mouth ; 
short, broad noses, as if broken at the root; flat 
expanded faces; with projecting upper jaws and salient 
teeth. The skull in this race is high, and squared or 
rounded, and the forehead low and broad. The moral 
character of the Malays, in general, is of an inferior 



328 



ETHNOLOGY. 



order. They differ both from the Negro and the Red 
Indian, being of a peculiarly active temperament, and 
fond of maritime enterprise. They are intellectual 
and ingenious. Borneo, Java, Sumatra, the Philippine 
Islands, New Zealand, the Polynesian and other isles, 
are inhabited by this variety of men. 

From these marked differences between the various 
branches of the human family, and from the apparent 
fixedness or permanency of these differences, some of 
them having existed and been observed from the earliest 
periods of historic time, some Naturalists have been led 
to affirm that the inhabitants of the earth are of various 
and distinct species ; that instead of there being but one 
race of human beings there are many races, each of 
which has had its own Adam and Eve. Professor 
Agassiz has put forth the opinion that, instead of the 
human family beginning with the creation of one man 
and one woman, a great number of individuals of each 
of the principal types of man were called into being, 
when the Race was created, possessing all those char- 
acters which their posterity afterwards inherited, and by 
which they are now mainly distinguished : but this 
writer appears not to have been settled in his views, 
having changed ground more than once. Sir R. I. Mur- 
chison has broached the idea, that the various races of 
man not only proceeded from different original stocks, 
but were introduced upon the earth at different dates or 
periods. Others, as Nott and Gliddon, assert that the 
races of man are essentially different creatures; that the 
Negro and Indian and some other low races are by 



ETHNOLOGY. 329 

nature incapable of ever rising to the blessings of either 
religion or civilization ; that they are not endowed with 
mental faculties adequate to the perception of religious 
sentiments, and, consequently, that they are formed for 
no higher destiny than the brutes that perish. " The 
whole of Africa," say these last writers, " south of 10° 
north latitude, shows a succession of human beings with 
intellects as dark as their skins, and with a conforma- 
tion of skulls that renders all expectation of their future 
improvement and Christianization an Utopian dream." 

It hardly need be said that these, and all similar 
views that assign a plurality of origin to the human 
race, are altogether at variance with the Bible, and 
utterly irreconcilable, not simply with isolated passages 
in it, but with its fundamental doctrine and with its 
chief and ultimate design. Throughout, the Sacred 
Volume recognizes in its history, and rests in its 
doctrines on the fact, that the whole human population 
of the globe has descended from one Father, Adam, 
whom God created in his own image, and from one 
Mother, who "was called Eve, because she was the 
mother of all living." Of this " one blood," the inspired 
Word affirms in sundry places and in diverse manners, 
" God made all nations of men for to dwell on all the face 
of the earth, and determined their times and the bounds 
of their habitation." 

The great central doctrine of Revelation is, that in 
consequence of one mans transgression, all of every 
clime, color, condition and character have become 
sinners. And this sinful, corrupt, depraved character is 



330 ETHNOLOGY. 

fbund to be the actual character of all mankind, without 
exception. No language can be plainer or more explicit 
than that of Revelation on this subject; and no fact can 
be more conspicuous and undeniable than human deprav- 
ity in every region of the globe. " There is none 
righteous ; no, not one. They are all gone out of the 
way ; they are together become unprofitable. With their 
tongues they have used deceit. Their feet are swift to 
shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways. 
There is no fear of God before their eyes. All the world 
is become guilty before God." To limit these represen- 
tations to any one race, or to any number of races, 
short of total humanity, is not merely to wrest the 
Scriptures from their obvious meaning, but to allow 
a principle of interpretation that would pervert or annul 
the meaning of all language, put darkness for light, and 
cloud with total obscurity everything that has been or 
can be written. It would be, moreover, to close our 
eyes to palpable evidence of the fact, which presents 
itself before us wherever we are and whithersoever 
we go. 

The theory that nations have had different ami dis- 
tinct origins also sets aside the great scheme of Redeem- 
ing Grace. In reference to this, likewise, nothing can 
be plainer than the declarations of Revelation, that the 
provisions of this grace are made ami meant alike for the 
whole human race, be they savage or civilized, Bar- 
barian, Scythian, Bond or Free. "God so loved the 
world that he gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever 
believeth in Him should not perish, but have ever- 



ETHNOLOGY. 331 

lasting life." Hence, the great commission is, " Go ye 
into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every 
creature" — aye, to every creature, to the Ethiop in his 
blackness and darkness and degradation no less than 
to the Scribes and Pharisees in the temple and the syn- 
agogue, to the nude and shivering Terra del Fuegiari no 
less than to the nabob clothed in his purple and fine 
linen. No language can be more full, more explicit, 
more universal in its application than that which sets 
forth the offering of the great Atoning Sacrifice of the 
Son of God, and throws abroad over all the world the 
wide, warm welcome of his redeeming grace to all, 
whosoever will receive it : " Look unto me, and be ye 
saved, all the ends of the earth." 

But it is unnecessary, on a point so obvious and so 
universally conceded as this, to multiply individual 
texts. We file in evidence the whole volume of God's 
Word — its types and predictions, its parables and 
promises, its warnings and entreaties, from the beginning 
to the end. 

It is obvious, therefore, that the theories which would 
assign different origins to differing nations are opposed to 
the Word of God, and inimical to the purposes of His 
grace and mercy toward sinful men. They are, indeed, 
in their tendency repulsive to every feeling of humanity, 
and calculated to repress the noblest sentiments of phi- 
lanthropy, and to paralyze every enterprise and effort to 
enlighten, elevate and save the ignorant, degraded and 
perishing tribes of humanity. 

The question now before us, then, is one fundamental 



332 ETHNOLOGY. 

in its importance, and vital in its interest. It is, — Are 
the inhabitants of the world all descendants of one com- 
mon progenitor ? Are they our brethren, of one flesh 
and one blood ? Are they men of like passions and affec- 
tions with ourselves ? Did they all die in Adam, and 
shall they all be made alive in Christ ? Is the Law of 
God binding on them as it is on us ? Does the Gospel 
of the Son of God provide and proclaim Salvation to 
them as it does to ourselves ? Do the glories of heaven 
and the woes of hell concern them as they concern us? — 
To these questions the theories that assign different 
origins to different nations return the answer, No ; but 
to them all the Bible gives a most emphatic Yes — yes ; 
our Father is one and we are all Brethren. We hope now 
to lay before the reader facts — abundant and indisput- 
able facts — in confirmation of this doctrine of the Holy 
Book. 

Before we proceed to specific arguments, we may just 
state, that in order to account for the prevailing differ- 
ences between the inhabitants of the various regions of 
the globe, numerous and striking as these differences 
may be, we are by no means under the necessity of 
having recourse to the hypothesis that they must have 
originated in different and distinct stocks, or in SO many 
Adams and Eves; another explanation, and one thai is 
in entire accordance with ascertained facts, readily and 
naturally suggests itself. We often observe in a family, 
among the children of the same parents, very marked 
differences in their bodily constitution and mental facul- 
ties, in their tastes, dispositions and habits, and for which 



ETHNOLOGY. 333 

no account, no explanation can be given by the science 
of man. And we may reasonably suppose that the same 
thing might have happened in the family of Noah. 
Through the inscrutable agency of God, and in accord- 
ance with his purpose in reference to the future popula- 
tion of the world, the three sons of Noah, "of whom 
the whole earth was overspread,'* may have been born 
with both physical and mental characters differing one 
from another; and herein, we may consistently hold, 
lay the germs of what, in the course of ages, under the 
moulding influences of climate, food, religion, culture, 
peace, war, oppression and slavery, developed into all the 
diversity of types now found among the world's popula- 
tion. Indeed, we detect in the sacred narrative, brief 
as it is, not a little to confirm us in this view. That 
these three sons of Noah were of quite different char- 
acters comes out very plainly in the transaction con- 
nected with their father's fall. Shem and J apheth show 
themselves possessed of qualities entirely different from 
those of Ham and his son Canaan ; these were mean 
and sensual, those were reverent and noble. And in 
perfect harmony with all this was the prediction given 
concerning the destiny of their respective descendants. 
"Japheth should be enlarged" — as afterward appeared, 
to occupy an extended portion of Asia, and the whole of 
Europe. " In the tents of Shem God would dwell" — as 
it came to pass among the Hebrews. " Canaan should 
be their servant" — the descendants of Ham should be 
subject to the descendants of both Shem and Japheth ; 
" servants of servants should they be : " and who does 



334 



ETHNOLOGY. 



not know that this has been the sad fate of the sable 
population of Africa in all generations?* From the 
distinctive peculiarities of the three sons of Noah, there- 
fore, may have descended the three leading types of man, 
under which, our highest ethnological authorities, Cuvier 
and Dr. J. C. Prichard and Dr. R. G. Latham, have 
classified the whole human race. 

We now advance to particulars, and shall notice first 
the main points of Difference between the races of man. 
on which are based the arguments for plurality of origin ; 
and then their points of Similarity and Likeness,* which 
we believe prove mankind to be of one species and 
originally of one blood. 

Points of Difference in the Races. 

There are found, as already stnted, numerous points 
of difference, more or less marked and important, be- 
tween the native inhabitants of the several climes of 
the globe. And we note, 

1. The difference in the Form of the Skull. Dr. Prich- 
ard has shown that there are but three leading types of 
cranial conformation — the Oval, the Pyramidal and the 
Prognathous — of which all others are variations or com- 
binations. 

The Oval or Elliptical form of skull is distinguished 
by the symmetry of its outlines and proportions, there 
being no excess either of prominence or depression. The 

cranial cavity is large, the forehead full and elevated, 



x Comp. Dixstrtations on (he l^-ojrficcics, by Bp, Newton. 



ETHNOLOGY. 335 

the face small in proportion; thus indicating the pre- 
dominance of the intellectual powers over the instinctive 
propensities. To this type belong those nations of Asia 
and Europe described as Caucasians, and are the most 
distinguished for their intellectual advancement. 

The Pyramidal Skull corresponds with that class 
termed Mongolian, but is most characteristically seen in 
the Esquimaux. The striking peculiarity of these skulls 
is the great lateral prominence of their cheek-bones and 
zygomatic arches, together with an extreme flatness of 
the upper half of the face, whilst the forehead rapidly 
narrows at its highest part; so that, on a front view, 
the portion of the skull above the line joining the cheek- 
bones has an almost pyramidal form, that line serving 
as the base. The orbits of the eyes are large and deep ; 
and the bones surround them in such a manner that, 
in most instances of this conformation, the opening of 
the lids has a decided obliquity, the inner angle being 
directed downwards. The whole face, instead of ap- 
proaching the oval as in Europeans, is of a lozenge shape ; 
and the larger proportion which it bears to the capacity 
of the cranium indicates in the pyramidal skull a more 
ample extension of the organs of sensation. The greater 
part of the races of this type are nomadic ; some of them 
wandering with their flocks and herds over the vast 
plains of High Asia; whilst others creep along the 
shores of the Icy Sea, supporting themselves by fishing. 

Of the Prognathous Skull the distinguishing feature 
is the forward prominence of the jaws. This character 
is most marked in the Negro races of the Guinea coast, 



336 ETHNOLOGY. 

and in some of the Polynesian and Australian races. 
From the common appearance of the skull, it might be 
supposed that it had been compressed at the two sides ; 
consequently, instead of being flattened in front, as in 
the preceding case, the bones of the face project far 
forwards, and the occiput backwards. This projection 
is especially manifested in the upper and lower jaw- 
bones ; and its effect is increased by the circumstance 
that the front teeth do not spring vertically from their 
sockets, but have a forward slant. There is a lack of 
elevation in the forehead, but not in the cranial capacity 
as a whole, there being a backward elongation of the 
skull. The sockets of the eyes and the cavities of the 
nose are unusually large. The organs of hearing, too, 
seem to be very largely developed. This configuration 
is to be met with, in varying degrees, among the greater 
part of the nations of tropical Africa, and is generally 
associated in our minds with the idea of degradation. 
People of this type are for the most part hunters, 
depending for their food on the spontaneous productions 
of the soil, or the precarious fruits of the chase. They 
are but little acquainted with the arts, and stand low in 
social life. 

Now, to ascertain the bearing of the existence of those 
several types of skulls on the subject of Unity or Plu- 
rality of origin, two questions must be answered — Can 
lines be drawn according to these types dividing the 
whole of mankind into so many distinct classes, such as 

different species usually axe? and. Are these different 
conformations permanent, having been transmitted from 



ETHNOLOGY. 337 

generation to generation without essential variation, as 
is found to be the case with different species ? If these 
questions can be answered in the affirmative, it must be 
admitted that they favor the idea of specific distinction 
or a plurality of origin ; but if it can be shown that 
both facts ancj history return a negative answer, they 
will offer a strong corroboration of the Bible doctrine 
that " God has made of one blood all nations of men for 
to dwell on all the face of the earth." 

First, then, can lines be drawn according to the lead- 
ing types of skull dividing the human kind into so many 
distinct classes, such as different species usually are found 
to be ? or, do we, in passing from one group of nations 
to another, find them undergoing such gradual modifica- 
tions as to render it impossible to draw any definite line 
between them ? « 

When we examine the cranial conformation of the 
whole Caucasian group of nations, we find that, although 
the elliptical type prevails among them, it is in very 
different degrees of development. Certain races manifest 
a decided tendency towards the pyramidal, others toward 
the prognathous character; and considerable variations 
may be seen among individuals of the same race. If the 
Mongolian group be surveyed, the peculiarities of the 
pyramidal skull will be often found so much softened 
down, as to approach the elliptical form; sometimes 
throughout the whole of certain races — occasionally only 
in individuals. Between the African nations the differ- 
ence is still more remarkable. Some of them present 

the prognathous type in its most repulsive development ; 
22 



338 ETHNOLOGY. 

in other cases, the pyramidal form is nearly as evident 
as among many of the northern Asiatics ; others again 
exhibit a decided tendency towards the more elevated 
and symmetrical type of the Caucasians. There is an 
equal dissimilarity in cranial form among the widely- 
spread and isolated tribes which people Oceania. Whilst 
the skulls of the Malayan portion of this population are 
referable to the pyramidal type rather than to any other, 
there are savage races in and around Australia which 
are nearly, if not quite, as prognathous as the African 
Negroes ; at the same time, in many parts of the Polyne- 
sian Archipelago, we meet with tribes of higher civiliza- 
tion, whose skulls can scarcely be distinguished from the 
best European forms. So, among the American races, 
the Esquimaux is the exaggeration of the pyramidal 
type; yet in some of the Southern nations the character 
of the skull inclines to become prognathous ; in others 
elliptical. Such, indeed, is the extent of variation that 
the types, which appear to be most remotely separated, 
are ascertained to be really connected by such a grada- 
tion of intermediate or transitional forms, that it is 
frequently impossible to say to which of the types a 
particular specimen should be referred. 

Thus clearly does it appear that no line can be drawn 
according to the conformation of skulls dividing man- 
kind into specific and distinct races. This, indeed, is 
acknowledged by the most zealous advocates of distinct 
origins to be utterly impossible; even Nott and Gliddott, 
in their Types of Mankind) confess that the types are 
hopelessly commingled: — "It would bo a vain task, 



ETHNOLOGY. 339 

say they, at the present day to attempt any unravelling 
of this tangled thread, and to make anything like a just 
classification of types." Yet, on their theory of distinct 
origins or stocks, each race should have fixed and definite 
characters, common to all its subdivisions, and distin- 
guishing them from those of other races; whereas, in 
nature, in the living population of the globe, on the 
contrary, we find the characters shading off in nations, 
in families, in individuals, so as to approach a common 
type. In view of this fact, the writers last quoted make 
the admission that " no classification of races yet put 
forth has any foundation whatever in nature." What 
grounds then have we to believe in the existence of 
what can neither be located, nor described, nor defined ? 
— This fact alone, then, invalidates the theory. 

But, second : Are these different conformations per- 
manent ? that is, have they been transmitted from gen- 
eration to generation without essential variation, as is 
found to be the case with different species of animals, 
at least within historic times ? or, Have we evidence of 
departure from one type and approach toward another, 
in the annals of any branch or branches of the human 
family ? 

The advocates of distinct origins, it is admitted, can 
adduce many facts and some records that seem to favor 
their side of the question ; and it is also freely acknowl- 
edged that the opposite view is not altogether without 
its difficulties, and that the existence of Man in so 
many varied races is, in many respects, a great mystery. 
When and How did the human varieties begin are 



340 ETIIXOLOGY. 

questions that have not as yet been answered to the 
entire satisfaction of any. Nevertheless, a mass of facts 
has been gathered within the past half century from the 
monuments, history, and habits of various nations, which 
we believe conclusively prove the origin of all races to 
be one and the same. 

The Negro perhaps is the type most frequently cited 
as an example of the fixedness and permanency of 
physical features and mental character. The existing 
Ethiopian physiognomy is said to ftgree precisely with 
the representations transmitted to us from the remotest 
periods, in those marvellous pictures, whose preservation 
in the tombs and temples of Egypt has revealed to us 
so much of the inner life of one of the most ancient 
civilized nations of the world. In one of the most 
perfect of these paintings, a great Egyptian Monarch 
is symbolically represented as ruling with the power of 
life and death over subject races ; and these are supposed 
to be depicted with accurate and characteristic likeness. 
Conspicuous in this group is one figure, a Negro, painted 
to the life both in form and color, which, it is said, 
proves that the race which departs most widely from 
the European type, possessed at that remote period 
exactly the same characters which mark it at the 
present (lav. The Negro kneels at the feet of Sethofl 1., 
in (he same attitude 4 of bondage and submission which 
typifies only too faithfully the enduring servitude of his 
pace. The blackness of color, the WOOllinesS of hair, the 

flatness of nose, the projection of the lips, which are so 

familiar to us, are all clearly depicted. At periods not 



ETHNOLOGY. 341 

much later in the history of this country, we have 
elaborate representations of battles with Negro nations 
— representations which are thought to go far to show 
that the race was then more able to maintain a contest 
with other races than it has ever been in recent times. 

Without wishing or designing to detract anything 
from the real value of these and other interesting dis- 
coveries made in this ancient land, we must apprize the 
reader that the evidences derived from such sources are 
by no means so conclusive in regard to the 'permanency 
of human types as some would have us believe. Indeed, 
competent judges, who have gone and examined these 
pictorial representations for themselves, have come away 
from them with very different and even opposite impres- 
sions. Mr. Charles Darwin has this Note on the point — 
"With respect to the figures of the famous Egyptian 
caves of Abou-Simbel, M. Pouchet says that he was far 
from finding recognizable representations of the dozen or 
more nations which some authors believe that they can 
recognize. Even some of the most strongly marked 
races cannot be identified with that degree of unanimity 
which might have been expected from what has been 
written on the subject. Thus Messrs. Nott and Gliddon 
state that Rameses II. has features superbly European ; 
whereas Knox, another firm believer in the specific dis- 
tinction of the races of man, speaking of the same 
monarch, insists in the strongest manner that he is 
identical in character with the Jews of Antwerp. Again, 
while looking in the British Museum with two competent 
judges, officers of the establishment, at the statue of 



342 ETIIXOLOGY. 

Amunoph III., we agreed that he had a strongly negro 
east of features ; but Messrs. Nott and Gliddon describe 
him as a hybrid, but not of negro intermixture." * 

Cuts and profiles of Egyptian statuary and skulls are 
often offered in like manner, in works on this subject, as 
evidence of the fixedness of human types. " We object 
to these," says an able Reviewer of Nott and Gliddon's 
Types of Mankind; " for what evidence have we of the 
accuracy of these original portraits made by those rude 
artists, according to Mr. G., six thousand years since ? 
Some were coarse colossal statues, some bas-reliefs, so 
marred and distorted, that nothing could be made of 
them until the outer coatings were taken off. Is there 
no chance here that a slip of the pencil, an unskilful 
hand, a vagrant fancy, or a crude conjecture may have 
distorted the lineaments of the face, caricaturing one and 
lending new traits to another? In truth, the originals 
themselves are grotesque, not to say burlesque, carica- 
tures of the human form. The authors themselves 
acknowledge this difficulty, and, in one instance, have 
given three different cuts of the same subject, 'in proof 
of how artists differ/ These cuts would hardly allow 
the original to be cousin-german to himself. And yet 
these are the scientific demonstrations given to prove, 
that the Swarthy or Black Egyptian) 'with curly or 
frizzled hair, tumid lips, slender limbs, small head, with 
receding forehead and ('11111/ differed, toto ooelo, from the 
Nogro ! " f 



* Octet nt of Man, Vol. I., p. 209. 

t Presbyterian licview, Vol. III., p. 187. 



ETHNOLOGY. 343 

These statements may aid the reader in deciding for 
himself what weight should be allowed to this class of 
evidences in proof that the Negro features and character 
are fixed and permanent. Allowing that this race has 
preserved its general characteristics through this lengthy 
period, that fact would only go to show permanency 
under tlie same conditions, viz., a torrid clime and a state 
of barbarism and slavery, which have been the common 
lot of this people in every age. That the Negro 
Race retain, in the main, the same physical type and 
the same temperament, therefore, is proof, not so much 
of the unchangeableness of the type, as that their habi- 
tation and social condition have continued the same. 
The social no less than the physical condition of 
man is concerned in determining his characteristics. 
The conformation of the skull and other bodily features, 
according to the high authority of Dr. Prichard, are 
in general found to correspond with the stages of 
civilization. There are in mankind, he tells us, three 
principal varieties in the form and features of the head 
— the prognathous, the pyramidal, and the oval — which 
are most prevalent respectively, in the savage or hunting 
tribes, in the nomadic or wandering pastoral races, and 
in the civilized and intellectually cultivated divisions of 
the human family. And there are numerous instances 
of actual transition from one of these shapes of the head 
to another, and these alterations have taken place in 
nations who have changed their manner of life. That 
the negroes, therefore, should have retained their general 
type, while their social condition and local habitation 



344 ETHNOLOGY. 

have remained the same, is precisely what might have 
been expected. If through these three thousand years 
they had enjoyed the blessings of civilization their 
physiognomy to-day might have been very different 
from what it is. Wherever Negroes have made progress 
in civilization their features have undergone a corre- 
sponding change. The most elevated forms of skull 
among the African nations are found in those who have 
emerged, in a greater or less degree, from their original 
barbarism. This has chiefly taken place through the 
influence of the Mohammedan religion, which prevails 
extensively among the people of the central and eastern 
part of Africa. 

To all this it may be said that, the physiognomy of 
Negroes continues identically the same from parent to 
child even where they have been transplanted to a 
temperate climate and among civilized people. "We reply 
that the condition of such in these new circumstances 
has been anything but favorable to amelioration of body 
or improvement of mind. The change in general has 
been but faintly for the better, their lot, for the most 
part, being that of toiling slaves in rice-fields or on cotton 
and sugar plantations. Besides, it is obvious that the 
time which has elapsed since their removal is as yef too 
short to expeet any Considerable alteration of cranial 
configuration. Many of the Negroes now living in the 
West India islands arc children of natives of Africa, and 
a large proportion of the Negro population of the United 
States arc removed bj no more than two or three 

descents from their African ancestors. But according to 



ETHNOLOGY. 345 

the concurrent testimony of disinterested observers, both 
in the West Indies and in the United States, an approx- 
imation of physiognomy to the European model is pro- 
gressively taking place. The change is most apparent 
in the most favorable circumstances — in such as are 
brought into closest and most habitual relation with the 
whites, as in domestic servitude — we mean, of course, 
without any actual intermixture of races. 

That the cranial form of races is changed and changed 
decisively by change of climate, soil and manner of life 
we have undeniable historical evidence. A striking 
example is afforded by the cranial conformation of the 
Turks of Europe and Western Asia. It closely resembles 
that of the great bulk of the European nations, but 
departs so widely from that of the Turks of Central Asia, 
that many writers have referred the former to the Cau- 
casian rather than to the Mongolian stock. Yet histor- 
ical evidence sufficiently proves, that the Western Turks 
originally belonged to the Northern Asiatic group of 
nations, with which the Eastern portion of their nation 
still remains associated, not only in its geographical 
position, but in its physical characters and habits of life; 
and that it is in the Western branch, not in the Eastern, 
that the change has taken place, which amounts to 
nothing less than the entire substitution of a new type 
for the original one. So complete a change can scarcely 
be attributed to any other cause than civilization and 
social improvement; the constant tendency of which is 
to smooth down the excessive prominences both of the 
pyramidal and prognathous skulls, and bring them 



3-JG ETHNOLOGY. 

towards the symmetry of the elliptical. The Eastern 
Turks, retaining the nomadic habits of their ancestors, 
have retained also their cranial conformation. 

"We have a similar instance in the Magyar race, of 
which the Hungarian nobility is composed. This race, 
which is not inferior in physical or mental characters to 
any in Europe, is proved by historical and philological 
evidence to have been a branch of the great Northern 
Asiatic stock, closely allied in blood to the stupid and 
feeble Ostiaks and the untamable Laplanders. About 
ten centuries ago they were expelled by Turkish 
invasion from the country they then inhabited, which 
bordered on the Uralian Mountains ; and they in their 
turn expelled the Slavonian nations from the fertile 
parts of Hungary, which they have occupied ever since. 
Having thus exchanged their abode from the most rigor- 
ous climate of the old continent — a wilderness where 
Ostiaks and Samoiedes pursue the chase during only the 
mildest season — for one in the south of Europe, amid 
fertile plains, abounding in rich harvests, they laid aside 
the rude and savage habits which they are recorded to 
have brought with them, and adopted a settled mode of 
life. In the course of a thousand years, their type of 
skull has been changed from the pyramidal to the 
elliptical, and they have become a handsome people, of 
fine Btature and regular European features. There is no 
reason whatever to regard this improvement as arising 
in any considerable degree from an intermixture of 
races; the Magyars being to this day distinct from the 
other inhabitants of Hungary. Nor would it have been 



ETHNOLOGY. 347 

produced by mere change of place, without civilization. 
For among the Laps — who, though inhabiting Europe, 
retain the nomadic habits of their Mongolian ancestors — 
the pyramidal form is still preserved. 

But, we can both strengthen and illustrate our argu- 
ment from the history and habits of a people more 
familiar than either of the foregoing — namely, of the 
Irish. There are certain districts of Ireland, chiefly 
inhabited by the descendants of the native Irish driven 
by the British from Armagh and the south of Down, 
about two centuries ago. These people, whose ancestors 
were well-grown, able-bodied and comely, are now re- 
duced to an average stature of five feet two inches, are 
pot-bellied, bow-legged, and abortively featured ; and are 
especially remarkable for open projecting mouths, with 
prominent teeth and exposed gums, their advancing 
cheek bones and depressed noses bearing barbarism on 
their very front. In other words, within so short a 
period, they seem to have acquired a prognathous type 
of skull, not unlike the savages of Australia. * It is very 
noticeable, indeed, how close is the resemblance between 
the lowest classes of the Irish population and the natives 
of Australia, as depicted by recent travellers. It is an 
untoward circumstance in human nature, that altera- 
tions for the worse appear to take place much more 
quickly, and much more certainly, than alterations for 
the better. 

Colonies from Europe also exhibit numerous instances 



* See Dublin University Magazine, No. 48. 



348 ETHNOLOGY. 

of physical change. The descendants of English settlers 
in the American States display a considerable variation 
in general form and aspect from the parent nation. The 
children of European settlers in New South Wales are 
tall, thin, and weaker than their progenitors. In the West 
Indies, some distinct new peculiarities of structure have 
been observed in the descendants of English settlers : 
their cheek-bones are higher, and their eyes deeper set 
in the head, than those of the English nation generally ; 
in these respects, they approximate to the form of the 
aboriginal races of the American continent and islands ; 
and it has been pointed out that such a form is useful in 
protecting the eyesight from the glare of the tropical sun. 

The foregoing facts and arguments offer sufficient 
proof that the existing and distinctive types of mankind 
are not fixed and permanent, and that unlike as they 
are in their cranial forms, they may have descended 
from one and the same original stock. 

2. Difference in the Color of the Shin. — This is the 
most striking difference between the races of Man. and 
is by many regarded as a convincing evidence that they 
have proceeded from different origins. That the Ethio- 
pian should change his skin — that is, that a black race 
should become of any other color — is commonly regarded 
as impossible as for a man to "add one cubit to his 
stature." Hence the retention of the characteristic hue 
of a race in the descendants of individuals who have 
long since migrated or been carried into a temperate 
climate, is continually appealed to as clear evidence of 
a separate and distinct origin, or that the black man 



ETHNOLOGY. 349 

always has been a black man. But this opinion will 
not stand the test of facts and history any better than 
that of the fixed form of the skull. We find that color 
or complexion is extremely variable, being affected by 
numerous agencies, such as climate, food and habits of 
life. Hence tribes belonging to the same great branch 
of the human family are found frequently to vary in 
hue according to the peculiarity of their local habitation, 
and their manner of life. 

All travellers who have visited the high lands of 
Arabia describe the inhabitants as having light com- 
plexions, their eyes being often blue and their hair red. 
The Arabs near Muscat are of a sickly yellow hue; 
those of the neighborhood of Mecca are of a yellowish 
brown ; while those of the low countries bordering on 
the Nile are almost jet black. 

We find a similar variation of shades among the 
Kabyles, a people that inhabit the northern borders of 
Africa. Here are tribes connected by the closest affinity 
of language, and who agree also in every other impor- 
tant physical character, yet differing widely in their 
complexion. Although the Kabyles in general have 
a swarthy hue and dark hair, yet the tribe of Mozabi 
is described as being remarkably white ; and the lofty 
table-land called Mount Aurasius is inhabited by a tribe 
so fair and ruddy, and with hair of so deep a yellow, 
that they have been compared to the Germans. On the 
other hand, the Tuaryk tribes, bordering on the Great 
Desert, have a complexion as black as that of the 
darkest Negro. 



350 ETHNOLOGY. 

The same is true of the Jews. While the descendants 
of Abraham are everywhere recognizable by certain 
peculiarities of physiognomy, yet they exhibit a great 
variety of complexion among them. In England, blue 
eyes and flaxen hair are not unfrequent; but a light 
brunette hue with black hair is most common. In Ger- 
many and Poland, the ordinary complexion is more 
florid, with blue eyes and red hair. On the other hand, 
the Jews of Portugal are very dark ; while those who 
have been settled from very remote times in Cochin and 
the interior of Malabar, are so black as not to be dis- 
tinguishable by their complexion from the native inhab- 
itants. It is both a curious and an interesting fact, that 
at Mattacheri, a town of Cochin, there is another colony 
of Jews, who arrived in that country nearly seven cen- 
turies later; these are several shades lighter in their 
complexion than the former, and are called Jerusalem 
Jews ; and the fact that they have not yet been black- 
ened as deeply as their brethren shows that time is a 
necessary condition in the coloring process. From all 
these facts it may be stated as a general proposition, 
that the complexion of the Jews tends with time to 
assimilate itself to that of any nation in which their 
residence lias been cast. The same holds equally true, 
of course, of every other nation. 

Among the Hindoo nation are to be found the most 
masked diversities of complexion; Borne are as black as 
Negroes, some are of a copper color, others a little darker 
than the inhabitants of southern Europe, ami others 
have actually lair Complexions with bine eyes, and 



ETHNOLOGY. 351 

auburn or even red hair. These diversities appear to 
be connected with two sets of conditions, as their pro- 
ducing causes. The first place must be assigned to the 
marked differences of climate which prevail between the 
mountainous elevations of Kashmir, and the low plains 
bordering the great rivers of India. Castes, also, no 
doubt, have their influence, as they serve to perpetuate 
the same modes of life in particular families from genera- 
tion to generation. 

If from the Asiatics we turn to the nations of Africa 
we shall encounter a similar class of facts. It is now 
well known that there exists a great diversity of com- 
plexion among the different inhabitants of this vast con- 
tinent. Some of the Kafir tribes, among which are 
often to be met high foreheads and prominent noses, 
have also light brown complexions and reddish hair; 
yet there is no ground whatever for attributing to them 
an origin distinct from that of the proper Negro races, 
with which they are connected in different degrees of 
affinity. There are tribes even upon the Gold and Slave 
Coasts, considerably lighter than ordinary Negroes. The 
Hottentot has a large admixture of yellow in his com- 
plexion ; whilst the Fulahs of central Africa are of a 
dark copper color. 

Again : The aborigines of the American continent, 
though called " Red Men," are by no means all of this 
color. While some of the North American Indians are 
copper-colored, others are as fair as many Europeans ; 
others still are of a brown or yellow complexion; 
and others yet nearly, if not quite, as black as the 



352 ETHXOLOGY. 

Negroes of Africa. Oftentimes, no lines can be drawn 
between tribes. 

In several of the Polynesian Islands the complexion of 
the mass of the people, who are continually exposed to 
the influence of the sun and air, grows darker, the features 
ugly, and the hair somewhat crisp, with a decided ap- 
proach towards the Pelagian Negro Type. Yet among 
the very same people, the superior caste, who pass their 
days in ease, and are carefully sheltered from the tro- 
pical sun, have a fair complexion and an almost Euro- 
pean cast of features. All intelligent persons who have 
long resided in the Pacific islands, under circumstances 
favorable to accurate investigation, appear to have come 
to the conclusion that these differences can only be 
accounted for by the diversified agency of climate and 
physical influences on the different branches of a race 
originally the same. 

From all the foregoing facts it must be obvious that 
if Color be once adopted as a test of separate origin, we 
must suppose that tribes speaking the same language, 
having the same customs and traditions, and closely 
related in general conformation, sprang, nevertheless, 
from ancestors who had no relation to each other ; and 
we must assign a distinct pair to almost every island or 
group of islands, and in some instances even two or more 
pairs to a single island. Such are the difficulties of a 
diversity of origin. 

In further confirmation and illustration of our argu- 
ment from color, we may adduce a few additional historic 
evidences. The Barabra, or Berberines of the higher 



ETHNOLOGY. 353 

parts of the Nile, appear from researches made into their 
history, to be the descendants of the Nobatae, who were 
brought fifteen hundred years ago, from an oasis, in the 
interior of Africa, by order of Dioclesian, to inhabit the 
valley of the Nile. The district from which they were 
taken appears to have been Kordofan; the present 
inhabitants of which are true Negroes, and still preserve 
and speak the Barabra language. The Berberines live 
on the banks of the Nile ; and wherever there is any 
soil they plant date trees, set up wheels for irrigation, 
and sow dhourra and leguminous plants. At Cairo, 
where many of them resort, they are prized for their 
honesty> Now, this advance in civilization has been 
accompanied by a considerable change in complexion; 
for their present physiognomy and hue of skin are very 
similar to those of the ancient Egyptians; their hair, 
too, is long and but slightly crisped. This alteration 
could not have been brought about by any commixture 
with the Arabs or any other people of the Nile valley, 
for the Berberines have always kept themselves distinct. 

We have a similar instance in the Funge, who made 
themselves masters of Sennaar about three centuries 
ago ; although originally negroes of the Shilukh nation, 
they no longer present the physiognomy or complexion 
of that race, but approach much more nearly the Ber- 
berines. There appears in both cases to be a special 
tendency towards a red complexion, and even red hair. 

Again : In Northern India, there are tribes of moun- 
taineers descended from families which migrated at 
remote periods from the plains of Hindostan to high 

23 



354 ETHNOLOGY. 

tracts in the Himalaya, especially towards the sources of 
the sacred rivers. Many of these have so departed from 
the ordinary Hindoo aspect as to have acquired a fair 
complexion, with blue eyes, and auburn or red hair. 
The most marked change, however, has taken place in 
the Siah-Posh people, who separated from the Hindoo 
stock at a very early period. According to the account 
given by Sir A. Burnes and Mountstuart Elphinstone, 
the Siah-Posh are a people of exquisite beauty, with 
regular Grecian features, blue eyes, arched eyebrows, 
and fair complexion ; they have no resemblance to the 
Affghan or Cashmirian people near whom they dwell. 

If now we review the preceding facts, it will be suffi- 
ciently evident, we think, that Color or Complexion 
affords no support to the opinion that the different races 
of man have proceeded from different origins. We have 
seen that the Arab, removing to and remaining in the 
country of the Negro, becomes of Negro blackness ; that 
the Negro transplanted to the banks of the Nile assumes 
the hue of the Egyptian; that the Jews who have taken 
up their abode among the northern nations of Europe 
have exchanged their native dark complexion for one 
that is lair and even florid, whilst their brethren, who 
have wandered to the torrid climate of Cochin, have 
grown black as the blackest of the natives; that Hindoos, 
who, ages since, migrated to the high lands of the Hima- 
laya mountains, have become fair as the Europeans who 
have come thither from the far north; that the original 
populat ion of the American continent, whose geographical 
distribution and nihility of language aflbrd strong pre- 



ETHNOLOGY. 355 

sumption of a common origin, yet greatly vary in the 
shades of their complexion; and that the inhabitants 
of the islands of the Pacific are dark or fair, comely or 
ugly, according to the ease or hardship of their lot in 
life. — From all this it is clear that Color offers no proof 
whatever of distinct national origins; that widely as 
the inhabitants of the globe now differ in this respect, 
they may have all descended from one common father ; 
and that these differences of complexion owe their 
existence to geographical position, to elevation above 
the level of the sea, to food and habits of life, more than 
to any other assignable causes. 

3. Difference in the Quality of the Hair. — The color 
and the texture of the Hair differ as widely in the 
various races of mankind as do their complexions. Both 
the color and the quality of the hair seem to stand in 
close relation to the color and character of the skin from 
which it grows. 

The greater portion of the habitable globe is peopled 
by dark-haired races. Europe is the chief seat of light- 
haired people ; indeed, they seem to be almost confined 
to its limits, and within those limits to be cooped up 
for the most part in its northern countries. 

The fairest-haired inhabitants of the earth are to be 
found north of the parallel of 48° north latitude — that is, 
in England, Belgium, Northern Germany, and the greater 
portion of Russia. Between the parallels of 48° and 45° 
there is a debatable territory of dark brown hair, which 
includes northern France, Switzerland, and part of Pied- 
mont, passes through Bohemia and Austria Proper, and 



356 ETHNOLOGY. 

touches the Georgian and Circassian provinces of the 
Czar s empire. Below this line again, Spain, Naples, 
and Turkey, forming the southern extremities of the 
map of Europe, exhibit the genuine dark-haired races. 
So that in fact taking this quarter of the globe broadly 
from North to South, its people present in the color of 
their hair a perfect gradation — the light flaxen of the 
colder latitudes deepening by imperceptible degrees into 
the blue-black of the Mediterranean shores. To this 
regular gradation, however, there are some obvious ex- 
ceptions, among which is to be reckoned Venice, which, 
though in southerly latitude, has always been famous 
for the golden beauty of its hair. 

The United States and the Canadas, like the cities of 
London, Paris and Vienna, contain within them hair 
of all shades of color, the population being made up of 
many differing nations. 

The same physical causes, no doubt, are concerned 
in determining the color of* the hair as decide the com- 
plexion of the skin. 

An examination of the structure of the hair shows 
thai the difference of color is entirely owing to the tinct 
of the fluid which tills the hollow tube in each hair. 
This tinct or pigment shows through the cortical sub- 
stance in the same manner that it does through the 
epidermis of a Negro, Hair is in fact but a modification 

of the skin. 

The pigment cells of the hair have been examined 
with great care by Liebig, who has found considerable 
difference in their constitution according to their color. 



ETHNOLOGY. 357 

From his analysis it would appear that the beautiful 
golden hair owes its brightness to an excess of sulphur 
and oxygen with a deficiency of carbon. The black hair 
is indebted for its jetty aspect to an excess of carbon and 
a deficiency of sulphur and oxygen. The pure whiteness 
of the hair of Albinos is to be attributed to the entire 
absence of the ingredients that constitute the pigment — 
an absence which extends to the choroid coat of the eye 
and also to the iris. 

There is nothing in the character of human hair that 
can be regarded as a distinction of race or species. It is 
as variable and diversified as the color of the skin. The 
African nations have been collectively termed " woolly- 
haired;" but it is clearly proved by microscopic examina- 
tion that the hair of the Negro is not wool, and that its 
structure differs in nothing from that of the fairer races, 
save in the greater quantity of pigmentary matter con- 
tained in its interior — as is the case with jet black hair 
in our own people. The crisp twisted growth of negro 
hair is the only sign by which it can be really separated 
from the straight and flowing hair of Europeans. 

Among the nations of Africa, there are those, though 
in all respects of the Negro type, who yet have long and 
flowing hair. On the other hand there are many 
Europeans having no admixture of Negro blood, with 
hair so crisped and frizzled as almost to deserve the 
epithet of woolly. 

The Arabs, on the high lands of their native Arabia, 
have comparatively light hair, often inclining to red ; in 
the valley of the Jordan, a locality of intense and con- 



358 ETIIXOLOGY. 

stant heat, Mr. Buckingham observed that they had 
darker skins and coarser hair than he had observed 
elsewhere; and in the low countries bordering on the 
Nile, their hair is universally of jet black. 

The Jews in England, many of them at least, have 
flaxen hair; in Germany, often inclining to red; while 
in more southerly countries it is black. 

The Cinghalese are described by Dr. Davy as having 
hair varying in color from light brown to black ; the 
prevalent hue of their hair and eyes is black, but hazel 
eyes and brown hair are not very uncommon ; gray eyes 
and red hair are occasionally seen, though rarely ; and 
sometimes the light blue or red eye and light flaxen hair 
of the Albino. 

The Berberines while dwellers of Kordofan had the 
true Negro hair, but centuries of residence on the banks 
of the Nile has taken most of the curl out and converted 
it into long and flowing tresses. 

German families settled in Georgia, according to 
Khanikof s account, have acquired in the course of two 
generations dark hair and eyes. 

In the Mandan tribe of American Indians, about one 
in ten or twelve of the members ,of all ages and both 
sexes have bright silvery gray hair, which is heredi- 
tary; this hair is as coarse and harsh as that of a horse's 
mane, while the hair of other colors is lino ami soft.* 

But we need not further multiply facts of this kind — 
the foregoing instances sufficiently prove that neither 



*See Catlin'8 X>>rth American Indians, Vol. I., p, 49. 



ETHNOLOGY. 359 

the quality nor the color of the hair in any country, or 
among any people, is so uniform or so permanent as to 
constitute it a specific distinction between them ; on the 
contrary, we have seen that, like the complexion of the 
skin, it varies greatly both in its texture and in its hue, 
according to habits and external physical circumstances. 

From all that has been said in the preceding pages we 
are warranted, then, to draw these two conclusions — 
First, that the differences observed in the form of the 
skull, in the color of the skin, and in the quality of the 
hair, of the various races of men, do not justify, much 
less prove, the assertion that they have proceeded from 
distinct origins ; Second, that these differences all may 
be accounted for by the prolonged influence of geograph- 
ical positions, of elevation above the level of the sea, of 
the dryness or dampness of the atmosphere, and of 
savage or civilized habits of life. 

We now advance to lay before the reader evidence of 
a more positive character that all mankind are of one 
species, and descended from one and the same stock. 

Points of Identity in the Races. 

Though the various Races of Man, in their outward 
appearance, differ in many respects, as we have just 
seen, yet in their organization, in their bodily functions, 
and in their mental and moral faculties, they are found 
alike in every essential particular. In all respects they 
exhibit the usual tests of specific identity ; and we offer 
as our first argument for the unity of mankind that — 

1. The human Race exhibits no organs, or functions, or 



360 ETHNOLOGY. 

features, by icliich any certain or definite lines can be 
drawn dividing them into distinct species. This is evident 
from the fact that there is the greatest possible diversity 
among capable judges on this point. Virey divides them 
into two races, Jacquinot into three, Kant into four, 
Blumenbach into five, BufYon into six, Hunter into 
seven, Agassiz into eight, Pickering into eleven, Bory 
St. Vincent into fifteen, Desmoulins into sixteen, Morton 
into twenty -two, Crawfurd into sixty, and Burke into 
sixty-three. This diversity of judgment among eminent 
naturalists plainly shows that the human varieties are 
so closely related and graduate so insensibly into each 
other that no clear distinctive characters can be dis- 
covered between them. This Mr. Darwin pronounces 
" a most weighty argument against treating the races of 
Man as distinct species." " Every naturalist," says he, 
u if of a cautious disposition, will unite all the forms 
which graduate into each other as a single sj>ecics; for he 
will say to himself, that he has no right to give names 
to objects which he cannot define." 

2. lite great Laws of the Vital Functions are the same 
in all the varieties of Man. The periods and duration of 
life, the economy of the sexes, and the phenomena of 
parturition and reproduction are constant and uniform in 
all the races. In the extreme of age and in the average 
duration of life, under similar circumstances as to 
climate and mode of life, there is no difference. This is 

true, also, of the period at which the body attains its full 
development; of that at which the capability of repro- 
duction is first manifested in the female, and of that 



ETHNOLOGY. 361 

at which it ceases. The slight differences which are 
observable as to these particulars among the several races 
are not greater than among individuals of the same race 
or nation under similar climatic influences. The term 
of gestation, which is one of the most definite of all the 
periodical phenomena of life, and which frequently dif- 
fers widely in two species nearly allied to each other, is 
exactly the same in every one of the human races. 

3. The human races, without exception, are fertile one with 
anotlter, and produce offspring equally fertile, " inter se/' 
which is held to be a leading test of specific identity. The 
proof of this is abundant in every quarter of the globe. 
In our own country we have every shade of admixture 
between the Whites and the Blacks, between the Whites 
and the Indians, and between the Indians and the Ne- 
groes. In Brazil we behold an immense mongrel popula- 
tion of Negroes and Portuguese and Indians. In Chili, 
and other parts of South America, we see the whole pop- 
ulation, consisting of Indians and Spaniards, blended in 
various degrees. In many parts of the same continent 
we meet with the most complex crosses between Indians, 
Negroes and Europeans ; and such triple crosses are 
regarded as the severest test of the mutual fertility of 
the parent individuals. In Australia and Tasmania we 
encounter a mixed breed between the aborigines and 
the European settlers. In one island of the Pacific we 
find a small population of mingled Polynesian and 
English blood ; and in the Yiti Archipelago a population 
of Polynesians and Negritos crossed in all degrees. 
Analogous cases may be found in South Africa, in India, 



362 ETIIXOLOGY. 

in China, and, in fact, wherever different races have 
come in contact for any length of time. Here, then, we 
have the most decisive test, and have it too in all forms 
and degrees, that the various races of mankind are of 
one species and of one blood. 

4. All the Races of Man possess the same Intellectual 
Faculties and the same Moral Sense. On this point we 
find in the Edinburgh Review the following concise and 
lucid remarks: — "We find in the lowest tribes of 
humanity as in other races, unequivocal indications of 
the same moral and intellectual nature as that which 
the most civilized races of men exhibit ; these indica- 
tions becoming more obvious, the more complete our 
knowledge of their habits, not merely of action, but of 
thought. We can trace, in short, among all the tribes 
of the globe the same rational human nature — the same 
capacity for generating abstract ideas, and thus arriving 
at general principles, which is a distinguishing attribute 
of Man. So, again, we discover in all of them the same 
elements of moral feeling; the same sympathies and sus- 
ceptibilities of affection ; the same conscience or internal 
conviction of accountableness, more or less obscurely 
developed-; the same sentiments of guilt and self-con- 
demnation, and the same desire of expiation. These 

principles take very different forms of expression, even 
in civilized life; much more, therefore, ought we to be 
prepared for finding nothing more, even among the best 
specimens of uncivilized barbarism, than the mere rudi- 
ments of a higher understanding and of a nobler moral 
nature, than that which they have at present reached. 



ETHNOLOGY. 363 

But the rudiments are there ; though not always in the 
same degree of forwardness for being moulded to the 
institutions of a more regular society ; for the develop- 
ment of the intellectual powers under a rational educa- 
tion; and for that growth of the moral and religious 
sentiments which Christianity is pre-eminently fitted to 
promote in every mind that opens itself to its benign 
influence. 

" The aborigines of Australia were long supposed to 
be at the bottom of the scale of humanity, not merely 
as regards their physical condition, but to be deficient 
in their intellectual and moral faculties, and to want 
even the rudiments of any religious impression. More 
intimate acquaintance with them, however, has fully 
proved the fallacy of such statements. It is remarkable, 
too, that they possess many singular institutions, more 
resembling those of the North American Indians than 
of any other nation known to us. One great obstruc- 
tion to the improvement of their social state we are told 
consists in the great complexity of their landed tenure — 
the perverted ingenuity of which would do credit, it is 
said, to the genius of an astute lawyer. 

" It has been frequently said that the Hottentots differ 
from the higher races in their incapacity to form or to 
receive religious ideas. This, however, is by no means 
true. Though the early endeavors to introduce Chris- 
tianity among them met with the same obstinate resist- 
ance as has been the case in almost every similar 
instance, yet it is a memorable fact, that when the 
attempt was perse veringly made and rightly directed, 



364 ETHNOLOGY. 

the Hottentot nation lent a more willing ear than any 
other uncivilized race had done, to the preaching of 
Christianity; and no people has been more strikingly and 
speedily improved by its reception, — not only in moral 
character and conduct, but also in outward condition 
and prosperity. 'Perhaps/ says Dr. Prichard, 'nothing 
in the account given of them is more remarkable than 
the fact, that so strong a sensation was produced among 
the whole Hottentot nation, and even among the neigh- 
boring tribes of different people, by the improved and 
happy condition of the Christian Hottentots, as to excite 
a desire for similar advantages. Whole families of Hot- 
tentots, and even of Bushmen, set out for the borders 
of Kafirland, and even performed journeys of many 
weeks, in order to settle at Gnadenthal. It is a singular 
fact in the history of these barbarous races of men, that 
the savage Bushmen, of their own accord, solicited from 
the Colonial Government, when negotiations were opened 
with them with a view of putting an end to a long 
and bloody contest, that teachers might be sent among 
them, such as those who had dwelt among the tame 
Hottentots at Gnadenthal. History probably furnishes 
few parallel examples of a savage people, in treaty with 
a Christian power, making it one of the conditions of 
peace, thai Missionaries should be sent among them to 
instruct them in ( lh rist iani ty.' 

"Though the Negro, generally, is at present far be- 
hind, yet under favorable circumstances, the intellect 
and moral character of individual Negroes have been 

elevated to 1 he European standard. An enlarged ac- 



ETHNOLOGY. 365 

quaintance with the African character has led many 
persons to the belief that our boasted superiority is, after 
all, more intellectual than moral; and that in purity 
and disinterestedness of the affections, in child-like sim- 
plicity and gentleness of demeanor, in fact, in all the 
milder graces of the Christian temper, we may even have 
much more to learn of the despised Negro. 6 1 should 
expect,' said Channing, ' from the African race, if civil- 
ized, less energy, less courage, less intellectual originality, 
than in ours ; but more amiableness, tranquillity, gentle- 
ness, and content/ They might not rise to an equality 
in outward condition, but would probably be a much 
happier race. We have ourselves had considerable 
opportunity of comparing the capacity of Negro children 
with that of the lower class of our youthful town popu- 
lation ; and we have no hesitation in saying that it is 
in every respect equal, and that there is, if anything, a 
superior docility on the part of the Negro." 

The correctness of the above statements is abundantly 
established by well-authenticated facts, and it will not 
be out of place here to present two or three examples. — 
Towards the close of the last century a colored man in 
the State of Maryland, of pure Negro blood, whose name 
was Richard Banneker, acquired great celebrity for his 
proficiency and skill in mathematics. He was entirely 
self-taught. Having directed his attention to the study 
of astronomy, he at length composed an Almanac ; and 
this was produced in the English House of Parliament 
in evidence of the mental capacity of the African Race, 
and urged as an argument for their emancipation from 



3G6 ETIIXOLOGY. 

slavery; the calculations in it were so thorough and 
exact as to excite the admiration of such men as Pitt, 
Fox, and Wilberforce. 

An African chief, on the coast of Guinea, observing 
what a superiority civilization and learning gave to the 
Europeans over the Africans in their traffic, bargained 
with a Captain Swanstone, a native of Scotland, who 
traded on the coast, that his young son should be taken 
by him to his own country to be educated, and then 
returned. Accordingly, his father, an old man, came 
with his mother, and a number of sable courtiers, to a 
place on the side of a green eminence near the shore, 
and there, amidst the tears of the latter parent, he was 
formally consigned to the care of the British trader, who 
pledged himself to bring back his tender charge, some 
years afterwards, endowed with as much learning as he 
might be found capable of receiving. On shipboard he 
was named Thomas Jenkins. Unfortunately this captain 
died very shortly after landing in Scotland, and the poor 
black boy was left without a friend, and utterly destitute 
of everything. After various hardships, he was taken 
in by a compassionate farmer. Discovering his taste 
and aptitude for learning, this new friend sent him to 
an evening school, at which he made such progress as 
excited the astonishment of the neighborhood. While 
daily occupied with the drudgery of a farm servant, he 
began to instruct himself in Latin and Greek, and ere 
long also acquired considerable acquaintance with mathe- 
matics. His mind was deeply impressed with the truths 
of the Christian faith, and he became a regular and 



ETHNOLOGY. 367 

devout attendant of public worship and of all religious 
ordinances. He was universally regarded as a person 
of estimable character. When he was about twenty 
years of age, a vacancy occurred in the school of Teviot- 
Head ; a committee of the Presbytery of Jedburgh set a 
day on which they would meet and examine candidates 
for the situation. Among the competitors appeared 
Black Thomas, with his books under his arm. The 
committee was surprised, but could not refuse to read 
his testimonials and admit him to the examination like 
the rest. More than this, his scholarship was so de- 
cidedly superior to the others, that they could not 
avoid reporting him as the best fitted for the situation. 
Thomas retired in triumph from the field ; but his pros- 
pect was soon clouded. On the report coming before the 
Presbytery, a majority of the members were alarmed at 
the strange idea of placing a Negro, a born pagan, in 
such a situation ; and poor Tom was accordingly voted 
out of all the benefits of the competition. The poor 
fellow suffered dreadfully from this sentence, which made 
him feel keenly the misfortune of his skin, and the 
awkwardness of his situation in the world. But, fortu- 
nately, there were those interested in the matter who 
felt as indignant at the treatment as he felt depressed 
under it. The heritors, among whom the late Duke of 
Buccleuch was the chief, took up the case so warmly, 
that it was immediately resolved to set up Tom in 
opposition to the teacher appointed by the Presbytery, 
and to give him an equal salary. A room was hastily 
fitted up for the purpose, and Tom was at once installed 



368 ETHNOLOGY. 

in office. The result was, that after a short time the 
other school was completely deserted ; and the black 
pagan boy, who had come to Scotland to learn, soon 
found himself fully engaged in teaching the sons and 
daughters of Christians, and in the receipt of an income 
more than adequate to his wants. To the gratification 
of his friends, and to the no small confusion of the Pres- 
bytery, he proved an excellent teacher, and became as 
much beloved by his pupils as he was respected by those 
who employed him. 

We add one more example. In the year 1761, Mrs. 
John Wheatley, of Boston, New England, went to the 
slave market, to select from a crowd of unfortunates 
there offered for sale, a Negro girl, whom she might 
train, by gentle usage, to serve as an affectionate attend- 
ant during her old age. Amongst a group of more robust 
and healthy children this lady observed one, slenderly 
formed, and suffering apparently from change of climate 
and the miseries of the voyage. The interesting coun- 
tenance and humble modesty of the poor little Btranger 
induced Mrs. Wheatley to overlook the disadvantage of 
a weak state of health, and Phillis, as the young slave 
was subsequently named, was purchased in preference 
to her healthier companions, and taken home to the 
abode of her mistress. The child was in a state of 
almost perfect nakedness, her only covering being a 
strip of dirty carpet. These things were soon remedied 
by the attention of the kind lady into whose hands the 
little African had been thrown, and in a short time the 

effects of comfortable clothing and food were visible in 



ETHNOLOGY, 369 

her returning health. Phillis, at the time of her pur- 
chase, was some seven or eight years old, and the inten- 
tion of Mrs. Wheatley was to train her up for a common 
servant. But the marks of extraordinary intelligence 
which Phillis soon evinced, induced her mistress' daugh- 
ter to teach her to read ; and such was the rapidity with 
which this was effected, that, in sixteen months from 
the time of her arrival in the family, the Negro child 
had so mastered the English language, to which of 
course she was an utter stranger before, as to read with 
ease the most difficult parts of Sacred Writ. This un- 
common docility altered the intentions of the family 
regarding Phillis, and in future she was kept constantly 
about the person of her mistress, whose affections she 
entirely won by her amiable disposition and propriety 
of demeanor. 

At this period, but little attention was bestowed on 
the education of the laboring classes even of the whites, 
and much less of the slave population. Hence, when 
little Phillis, to her acquirements in reading, added, by 
her own exertions and industry, the power of writing, 
she became an object of very general attention. 

Of her infancy, spent in that unhappy land, whence 
she had been stolen, Phillis retained but one solitary 
recollection, but that is an interesting one. She remem- 
bered that, every morning, her mother poured out water 
before the rising sun — a religious rite, doubtless, of the 
district from which the child was carried away. Thus 
every morning, when the day broke over the land and 
the home which fate had bestowed on her, was Phillis 

24 



370 ETHNOLOGY. 

reminded of the tender mother who had watched over 
her infancy, but had been unable to protect from the 
merciless slavers. 

As Phillis grew up to womanhood, her progress and 
attainments did not belie the promise of her earlier 
years. She attracted the notice of the literary characters 
of the day and the place, who supplied her with books, 
and encouraged by their approbation the ripening of her 
intellectual powers. This w r as greatly assisted by the 
kind conduct of her mistress, who treated her in every 
respect like a child of the family — admitted her to her 
own table — and introduced her as an equal into the best 
society of Boston. Notwithstanding these honors, Phillis 
never for a moment departed from the humble and 
unassuming deportment which distinguished her when 
she stood, a little trembling alien, to be sold, like a beast 
of the field, in the slave-market. Never did she presume 
upon the indulgence of those benevolent friends who 
regarded only her worth and her genius, and overlooked 
in her favor all the disadvantages of caste and of color. 

Such was the modest and amiable disposition of Phillis 
Wheatley: her literary talents and acquirements ac- 
corded well with the intrinsic worth of her character. 
At the early age of fourteen, she appears first to have 
attempted literary composition; and between this period 
and the age of nineteen, the whole of her poems, which 

were given to the world, seem to have been written. 
Her favorite poet was Pope, and her favorite work the 

translation of the Iliad* Many of her pieces were 
written to commemorats the deaths of friends who had 



ETHNOLOGY. 



371 



been kind to her. The following little piece is on the 
death of a young gentleman of great promise : 

" Who taught thee .conflict with the powers of night, 
To vanquish Satan in the fields of fight ? 
Who strung thy feeble arms with might unknown ? 
How great thy conquest, and how bright thy crown ! 
War with each princedom, throne, and power is o'er ; 
The scene is ended, to return no more. 
Oh, could any muse thy seat on high behold, 
How decked with laurel, and enriched with gold ! 
Oh, could she hear what praise thy harp employs, 
How sweet thine anthems, how divine thy joys, 
What heavenly grandeur should exalt her strain ! 
What holy raptures in her numbers reign ! 
To soothe the troubles of the mind to peace, 
To still the tumult of lifers tossing seas, 
To ease the anguish of the parent's heart, 
What shall my sympathizing verse impart ? 
Where is the toalm to heal so deep a wound ? 
Where shall a sovereign remedy be found ? 
Look, gracious Spirit I from thy heavenly bower 
And thy full joys into their bosoms pour : 
The raging tempests of their griefs control, 
And spread the dawn of glory through the soul, 
To eye the path the saint departed trod, 
And trace him to the bosom of his God." 

Phillis Wheatley felt a deep interest in everything 
affecting the liberty of her fellow-creatures, of whatever 
condition, race, or color. She expresses herself with 
much feeling in an address to the Earl of Dartmouth, 
Secretary of State for North America, on the occasion 
of some relaxation of the system of haughty severity 
which the home Government then pursued towards the 
colonies, and which ultimately caused their separation 
and independence. 



372 



ETHNOLOGY. 



" Should you, my Lord, while you peruse my song, 
Wonder from whence my love of freedom sprung; 
Whence flow those wishes for the common good, 
By feeling hearts best understood — 
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate, 
Was snatched from Afric's fancied happy seat. 
What pangs excruciating must molest, 
What sorrows labor in my parents 7 breast ! 
Steeled was that soul, and by no misery moved, 
That from a father seized his babe beloved ; 
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray 
Others may never feel tyrannic sway ? " 

The constitution of Phillis was naturally delicate, and 
her health always wavering and uncertain. At the age 
of nineteen, her condition became such as to alarm her 
friends. A sea-voyage was recommended by the physi- 
cians, and it was arranged that Phillis should take a 
voyage to England, and which she did. She was there 
received and admired in the first circles of English 
society; and it was there that her poems were given 
to the world. And here, we have no hesitation in pro- 
nouncing the foregoing lines, written by this African 
slave girl at the age of sixteen, as being fully equal to 
a large proportion of pieces that appear in standard 
collections of English poetry, while in harmony, and 
depth of thought, they are far superior to many verses 
put forth under great names. 

" Of the skill of Negroes as carpenters and watch- 
makers, of their taste in drawing, of their musical 
talents, of their capacity in physical and mathematical 
science, many proofs might be given from the writings 
of those who have had opportunities of personal observa- 



ETHNOLOGY. 373 

tion. Blumenbach has declared that entire provinces of 
Europe might be named in which it would be most 
difficult to find in correspondents of the French Acad- 
' emy such good writers, poets and philosophers as some 
of them." 

The foregoing examples are sufficient to convince us, 
that among the many millions to whom no similar 
opportunities have ever been granted, many might be 
found fitted by the endowments of nature, and wanting 
only the advantages of education, to make them orna- 
ments, not only to their own race, but to humanity. 
And yet these are the beings whom it is the fashion 
with certain classes of writers to represent as little 
better than improved apes, and as having no sufficient 
claim to the brotherhood of humanity ! We most 
heartily wish that all the members of the race, to which 
these very writers belong, manifested an equal degree 
of improvability with many of these despised people. 
And we crave permission to ask these authorities, what 
better or clearer claims to true humanity can they them- 
selves produce than those offered by the mathematics of 
Richard Banneker, by the classics of Thomas Jenkins, by 
the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, and by the intelligence, 
heroism and piety exhibited by a hundred others that 
might be named ? j 

Of the fact, then, that all the Races of Man are 
endowed with the same Intellectual faculties and the 
same Moral sensibilities there can be no doubt whatever. 

5. Tlie Languages of the various races of Man are held 
to be traceable to One original tongue. 



371 ETHNOLOGY. 

Language is very variable ; in fact, all languages are 
in a state of perpetual change. No language now spoken 
in Europe is a thousand years old. The English of the 
nineteenth century could not understand and converse 
with the English of the tenth century — so great has 
been the transformation by abbreviation, new modes 
of pronunciation, new spelling, and other innovations. 
Hence the multiplication of languages and dialects, in 
the course of long periods of time. 

The number of languages spoken by the living popula- 
tion of the globe is very great — not less, probably than 
one thousand*-" — and these in their structure and sounds 
differ from one another as do the complexions and habits 
of those who speak them. But the vast labor and 
patient investigation of learned men, during the last 
fifty years, go to show that, as in a wide-spreading tree, 
the little twigs followed down meet in branches, and 
the branches again a little lower in the larger boughs, 
and the boughs finally in one trunk — so all the tongues 
of living men may be traced back till they meet in a few 
large branches, and these branches till they unite in one 
original language. All the languages of the Old Conti- 
nent, that is, of Europe, Asia and Africa, are believed to 
be traceable to five great branches, or families, and 
which arc the following : 

(1.) The Japetic Family of Languages^ or as they are 
sometimes called, the Indo-European Family. These 
are spoken from the East Indies northwestward 

* Adelun? makes the number 3U(U; Balbi SOU langages, and 5000 dia- 
lects ; Max Miillcr 000. 



ETHNOLOGY. 375 

through Asia and across the whole of Europe to the 
Atlantic. 

(2.) The Semitic Family. This includes the Hebrew, 
Arabic, Aramic, and Ethiopic languages. 

(3.) The Turanian Family. These are spoken over 
the vast countries of Central and Northern Asia, and 
extend to the polar regions of Europe and America. 

(4.) The Chinese and Indo-Chinese Family. These 
are the monosyllabic and uninflected lauguages. 

(5.) The African Family, spoken by the nations of 
Africa who inhabit the countries within a few degrees to 
the north of the equator, and all south of that line. 

More recently, the greatest of living philologists have 
reached the conclusion that all languages may be clas- 
sified into three families — the Aryan, the Semitic, and 
the Turanian. 

"Languages compared together and considered as 
objects of the natural history of the mind, and when 
separated into families according to the analogies exist- 
ing in their internal structure," says Humboldt, " have 
become a rich source of historical knowledge ; and this 
is probably one of the most brilliant results of modern 
study in the last sixty or seventy years. From the 
very fact of their being the products of the intellectual 
force of mankind, they lead us, by means of the elements 
of their organism, into an obscure distance, unreached by 
traditionary records. The comparative study of lan- 
guages shows us that races now separated by vast tracts 
of land are allied together, and have migrated from one 
common primitive seat ; it indicates the course and direc- 



376 ETIIXOLOGY. 

tion of all migrations, and, in tracing the leading epochs 
of development, recognizes, by means of the more or less 
changed structure of the language, in the permanence of 
certain forms, or in the more or less advanced destruc- 
tion of the formative system, which race has retained 
most nearly the language common to all who had emi- 
grated from the general seat of origin."* 

The relation or affinity of the languages thus classi- 
fied into one distinct family is traced and decided, not by 
the similarity of single words or of a few names, but by 
what is a far sajjpr and more certain test, namely, the 
fundamental structure of these languages. By the great 
scholars of the present day, who have devoted them- 
selves to this study, all accidental or merely ideal 
analogies, such as single words and names often prove, 
are left aside, and the original texture, the warp and 
woof of language, only, being taken as proof of the 
relation and common descent of different tongues. 

" The inference is fully warranted by what has been 
ascertained/' says Dr. Fraser, " that nothing valuable 
has been added to the substance of languages, that its 
changes have been those of form only, and that no new 
root or radical lias been invented by later generations. 
The Teutonic languages of Europe are illustrated by the 
language of Persia; the Latin of Italy connects itself 
with Russian idioms; and Greek with the Sanscrit of 
India. From Ceylon, with its fragrant breezes, to Ice- 
land, with its wintry storms, there is, irrespective of 



* Cosmos, Vol. II., p, 471. 



ETHNOLOGY, 377 

form, of color, of social life, and religious institutions, 
but one belt of language. The American tribes of the far 
West, Humboldt has assured us, are indissolubly united 
to the inhabitants of Asia ; the languages of Shem, Ham 
and Japheth have a common affinity; hills, plains, 
climates change, but language in its substantial elements 
is really more enduring than the pyramids of Egypt, the 
ruins of Palmyra, or the statues of Greece." * 

To illustrate briefly the method pursued by linguists, 
we may refer to the statements of Max Miiller respect- 
ing the Jape tic Family of languages. If we knew 
nothing, he observes, of the existence of Latin — if all 
historical documents previous to the fifteenth century 
had been lost, — if tradition even was silent as to the 
former existence of a Roman empire, — a mere compari- 
son of the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Walla- 
chian, and Rhaetian dialects would enable us to say that, 
at some time, there must have been a language from 
which these six modern dialects derive their origin in 
common. Without this supposition it would be impos- 
sible to account for their structure and composition, — as, 
for example, for the forms of the auxiliary verb to be, all, 
evidently, varieties of one common type ; while it is 
equally clear that no one of the six affords the original 
form from which the others could have been borrowed. 
So also in none of the six languages do we find the 
elements of which these verbal and other forms could 
have been composed ; they must have been handed down 



* Blending Lights, p. 132. 



378 ETHNOLOGY. 

as relics from a former period, they must have existed 
in some antecedent language, which we know to have 
been the Latin. 

In like manner this great linguist goes on to show that 
Latin itself, as well as Greek, Sanscrit, Zend, Lithuanian, 
Old Sclavonic, Gothic, and Armenian are also eight 
varieties of one common and more ancient type, and no 
one of them could have been the original from which 
the others were borrowed. They have all such an 
amount of mutual resemblance as to point to a more 
ancient language, the Aryan or Japetic. The people 
who spoke this unknown parent speech, of which so 
many other ancient .tongues were offshoots, must have 
migrated at a remote era to widely-separated regions of 
the Old World, such as Northern Asia, Europe, and 
India south of the Himalaya * 

It is now agreed among all scientific philologists that 
the whole group of languages embraced in the Japetic 
family have been derived from one primitive stock, 
deviating from their original identity by variations at 
first merely dialectic, but gradually increased. " There 
is internal evidence," says Dr. Prichard, k * in these 
languages themselves sufficient to prove that they grew 
by gradual dialectic development out of one common 
matrix. Any person who considers, with competent 
knowledge of these languages, the nature of their rela- 
tions to eaeli other, the fact that their original roots are 
for tin 1 most part common, and that in the great system 



* Oxford BseaySi lsoo. 



ETHNOLOGY. 379 

of grammatical inflection pervading these languages 
there is nothing else than the varied development of 
common principles, must be convinced that the differ- 
ences between them are but the result of the gradual 
deviation of one common language into a multitude 
of diverging dialects ; and the ultimate conclusion that 
is forced upon us is, that the Indo-European nations are 
the descendants of one original people, and consequently, 
that the varieties of complexion, form, stature, and 
other physical qualities which exist among them, are 
the results of deviation from an original type." * 

A similar course of investigation and comparison, lead- 
ing to a similar conclusion, has been pursued in regard 
to the remaining four great families of languages. 

Again : These five primitive stocks, the Japetic, the 
Semitic, the Turanian, the Chinese, and the African, are 
found to exhibit mutual affinities, — the formative words 
and inflections which pervade their whole structure, and 
are interwoven with their very genius, indicate their 
derivation from one common origin. "All the nations," 
says Chev. Bunsen, " which, from the dawn of history to 
our days, have been the leaders of civilization in Asia, 
Europe, and Africa, must consequently have had one 
beginning. This is the chief lesson which the knowl- 
edge of the Egyptian language teaches us." f Thus 
Egyptian researches have greatly and unexpectedly con- 
tributed to establish the doctrine of the common origin 
of all the languages of the globe; and to strengthen, 



* Beport on Ethnology, p. 244. 



f Beport, p. 294. 



380 ETHNOLOGY. 

therefore, the doctrine of the original unity of man- 
kind. 

"All languages in the world," says Klaproth, " are 
connected with one origin : a universal affinity is com- 
pletely demonstrated." Herder is equally decided in his 
belief that " the human race and human language go 
back to one source." Thus the science of language has 
conducted us back to remotest antiquity, to the primitive 
home of man, where and when " all were of one language 
and of one speech." 

6. Certain Tastes, Arts, and Customs are found to be 
common to all the Races of Mankind. Mr. Darwin, 
speaking on this point, says, " He who will read care- 
fully Mr. Tylor's and Sir J. Lubbock's interesting works, 
can hardly fail to be deeply impressed with the close simi- 
larity between the men of all races in tastes, dispositions 
and habits. This is shown by the pleasure which they 
all take in dancing, music, acting, painting, tattooing, and 
otherwise decorating themselves — in their mutual com- 
prehension of gesture-language — and by the same ex- 
pression in their features, and by the same inarticulate 
cries, when they are excited by various passions." :;: 

Certain arts and implements likewise are found to be 
universally disseminated among the human race. The 
club, J;he spear, the 4 bow, the flint arrow-heads, the canoe, 
the use of fire, shell and horn ornaments, religious rites 
and sacrifices, etc. All these, in one form or another, 
arc found in every region of the globe, and have been 



* Descent of Man, Vol. I., p. 223. 



ETHNOLOGY. 381 

in use through every period of its history, and they thus 
plainly point to the one origin of our Kace. 

It is unnecessary to multiply these evidences any 
further — those that have been presented we deem amply 
sufficient. We have seen that the differences observed 
in the form of the skull, in the color of the skin, and in 
the quality of the hair, of the various races of men may 
be satisfactorily accounted for by the prolonged influence 
of geographical positions, of elevation above the level of 
the sea, of the dryness or dampness of the atmosphere, 
and of savage or civilized habits of life ; and we have also 
seen that all the essential organs, members and functions 
of the human races are so identical that the most com- 
petent judges have failed to draw any certain dividing 
lines between them — that the laws of their vital functions, 
regulating the periods and duration of life and the whole 
economy of the sexes, are the same in all the varieties of 
mankind — that all exhibit that most decisive test known 
of the identity of species, namely, fertility one with 
another — that all possess the same intellectual faculties, 
the same moral sense, the same sympathies and affec- 
tions — that all languages and dialects as they are traced 
backward converge toward one original tongue — and 
that certain arts, practices, arms, and implements are 
and have been common to the inhabitants of every 
region of the globe. All this we regard as ample and 
convincing proof that all nations of men are descended 
from one common stock, from one and the same human 
pair. And we must say that we cannot conceive how 
any person can candidly weigh this mass of evidences, 



382 ETHNOLOGY. 

and not admit, that they constitute a demonstration of 
the fact as conclusive as the nature of the subject will 
admit, or that reason could demand. 

Evidences such as the above have served to convince 
and satisfy the ablest naturalists of our day that the 
origin of mankind is one. Professor Huxley says, 
"I am one of those who believe that, at present, 
there is no evidence whatever for saying, that mankind 
sprang originally from any more than a single pair ; I 
must say, that I cannot see any good ground whatever, 
or even any tenable sort of evidence, for believing that 
there is more than one species of man."* Equally 
decisive and emphatic is the testimony of Alexander von 
Humboldt — " The different races of men are forms of one 
sole species ; they are not different species of a genus." t 
And Mr. C. Darwin states that "he has no doubt that 
all the races of Man are descended from a single prim- 
itive stock." J To the foregoing we might add the names 
of Sir Charles Lycll, Prichard, Smith, Balbi, Adelung, 
Pougemont, and Bach num. In short, this is the prevail- 
ing opinion among ethnologists at the present day. 

The doctrine of the unity of mankind, then, which is 
the doctrine of the Bible, after all the various and 
repeated assaults of its enemies, may be considered as 
finally settled on the ground of simple scientific investiga- 
tion. And thus, as in a hundred other instances, the 
testimony of science comes at length to confirm that 
of the Inspired Word. 

* Oriyin of Species, p. 113. 
f Cosmos. X Descent of Man, Vol. L, p. 220. 



ETHNOLOGY. 383 

The common origin of the human races has been by 
no means an apparent fact to men ; indeed, the doctrine 
has been one involved in great obscurity, while many 
things seemed to speak directly against it. The varieties 
of languages, of complexions, of forms of skull, of expres- 
sions of features, and of qualities of hair, all would appear 
to favor strongly the idea that these races must have 
descended from different and distinct original stocks ; 
and it must be admitted that the national prejudices of 
the Jews, who accounted all Gentile nations as dogs and 
outcasts, would naturally and powerfully incline them to 
this latter view. Yet we find the sacred writers, with- 
out doubt or hesitation, laying the doctrine of the unity 
of mankind at the foundation of their holy Book and 
Religion ; and plainly and emphatically declare that all 
the races are the offspring of one common father, Adam ; 
that " God has made of one blood all nations of men to 
dwell on all the face of the earth"; and that there was 
a time when " the whole earth was of one language and 
of one speech." Whence came these views and thoughts 
into the minds of those sacred writers ? How, in their 
unscientific day, and in their circumstances of limited 
knowledge of the world and its inhabitants — how on 
subjects so difficult, on which there has ever since been 
such a variety of opinions among men, did they at once 
anticipate all that would be established on the subject in 
the far distant age of the latter part of the nineteenth 
century of the Christian era ? — how could they state 
at the outset what man after protracted scientific investi- 
gation would be led to believe at the last ? The simplest 



384 ETHNOLOGY. 

and most credible explanation that can be given of this 
is, that the Omniscient Spirit, that sees and knows all 
truth, guided them to the knowledge of the facts and to 
the statement of the truths, to which the world would 
at last come, but which would be reached by men in 
their own investigations only after ages had passed away. 

The theory that asserts the Races to be of different 
and distinct origins, as is ever to be expected from a 
doctrine founded in error, is adverse to the best interests 
of mankind, and tends to aggravate the direst evils 
under which the world has ever groaned — war and slavery. 
This is its obvious and certain tendency. It dissolves 
all the bonds of the human family, it dissevers all fra- 
ternal relation between peoples, it extinguishes all 
common sympathy, it makes differing races aliens one 
to another, and thus fosters the spirit of strife, enmity, 
and bloodshed. And hence the notorious fact, that in 
this country, in time past, it found some of its warmest 
advocates among those interested in the system of 
human slavery. 

On the other hand, the Bible doctrine of the unity 
of mankind, in harmony with the eternal tendency of 
truth, is eminently conducive to the peace and highest 
welfare of the world. It teaches us that the earth's 
population constitutes one family; that we are all 
vivified by one and the same hereditary blood; and 
thai we owe one to another the affection, sympathy, and 
kindness of brethren. Karon Humboldt, speaking of the 
important bearing of this doetrino, says, k - Deeply rooted 
in the innermost nature of man, and enjoined Upon him 



ETHNOLOGY. 



385 



by the highest tendencies, the recognition of this bond 
of humanity becomes one of the noblest leading princi- 
ples in the history of mankind." Yes — for it supplies 
a foundation for the broadest philanthropy, and offers 
incentives to the exercise of universal benevolence. It 
enjoins upon us the spirit of brotherly love, and the 
practice of brotherly kindness, toward every human 
being. It bids us carry the light and the blessings we 
enjoy to every benighted and destitute child of Adam, 
whether dwelling on this or that side of the globe, 
whether bleached amid polar snows or blackened be- 
neath tropic suns. It commands us to go forth into all 
the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature, 
with the assurance that whosoever believeth in the 

Son of God shall be saved. 

Note. — To all that has been said above, we may add that the Tradi- 
tions which prevail in all lands connect together the most distant and 
dissimilar races, and which, like the converging sunbeams, point us 
back to One Origin. 

1. The Creation of Man has its place in the legions of Greece, in the 
beliefs of India, in the cosmogony of Peru, in the traditions of the North 
American Indians, and of the South Sea Islanders. 

2. The Garden of Eden has its representation under the City of 
Brahma among the Hindoos, and under the Garden of the Hesperides 
among the Greeks. 

3. The Tree of Knowledge of good and evil has its counterpart in the 
Golden Apples, the mysterious Tree, and the watchful Serpent in 
classic fable. 

4. The Temptation of Eve has its record in the legend of the lovely 
Pandora, who, yielding to her fatal curiosity, opened the closed Box, 
from which flew forth diseases and wars to fill the world with woe. 

5. The Original Innocence and haziness of the first Human Pair are 
embodied in the traditions of China, Thibet, Persia, Ceylon, and India. 

6. The Division of Time into Weeks is found to have prevailed almost 
universally. 

25 



386 



ETHNOLOGY. 



7. The Serpent of Eden has its memory preserved in the wide-spread 
prevalence of Serpent Worship ; a practice found in Asia, Africa, 
Madagascar, the Friendly Islands, and various parts of America. 

8. Of the Deluge traditions are found in China, India, Persia, Egypt, 
Greece, the Pacific Isles, and in North and South America. 

9. Hie Institution of Sacrifice has been remembered and practised 
through all the ages, and among all the nations of the earth. 

These and similar traditions, as Dr. Fraser observes, "constitute 
a cumulative argument in favor of One Race, which cannot be ignored 
or set aside. Their prevalence is utterly inexplicable, except through 
the Bible narrative. On its basis alone can we so adjust the facts of 
science, and the common traditions of dissimilar races, as to realize 
perfectly harmonious results.'? 



Chronology 

AND 

The Antiquity of the Human Race. 



No other history than the Hebrew History even professes to go back to the crea- 
tion of man, or to give any account of the events which connect existing generations 
with the first Progenitor of their Race. And of that history the sole object ap- 
pears to be, to give in outline the order of such transactions as had a special 
bearing on Religious Truth, and on the course of Spiritual Belief. — Duke OF 
Argyll. 

387 




Chronological Difficulties : i. In regard to the aggregate Popula- 
tion of the Earth; 2. With regard to the Egyptian Mon- 
archy; 3. In connection with the early occupation of China; 
4. Respecting the early development of mankind into distinct 
Races; 5. In regard to the remote existence of distinct 
Languages. 

388 




Chronology 



AND 

The Antiquity of the Human Race. 



HRONOLOGY is the science of computing 
and adjusting periods of time, or of de- 
termining the dates of past events; and 
is, therefore, a branch of study of great 
importance to the right understanding of 
the Scripture history of mankind, as well 
as of history in general. 
The system of chronology commonly followed for all 
periods preceding the Christian era is that based on the 
Masoretic or Hebrew Text of the Old Testament Scrip- 
tures. This, we may notice, often differs more or less in 
its numbers from the Septuagint or Greek Text, while 
both differ from the Samaritan Text. Mnny of these 
variations have not yet been satisfactorily accounted for, 
while considerable light has been thrown on others of 
them by the laborious investigations of Hayes, Jackson, 
Hales, and others. 

It is further to be observed, that the Scripture, in 

389 




390 CI1ROXOLOGY. 

either Text, does not offer sufficient data for an exact or 
complete chronology, for it does not give a complete his- 
tory of the times to which it refers, but deals with special 
and detached periods, and only with special and marked 
individuals. Its chronological information, therefore, is 
not absolutely continuous ; there are even in some of its 
genealogies gaps the length of which we have no means 
of determining with certainty. Of the Sacred History, 
the main object appears to be to give in outline the 
order of such transactions as had a special bearing on 
Religious Truth, and on the course of Spiritual Belief. 
The intimations given in the earlier chapters of the 
Book of Genesis on all matters of purely secular interest, 
are incidental only, always very brief, and often quite 
obscure. 

In regard to many periods, concerning which no direct 
or explicit information is given, all our systems of chro- 
nology involve sv/ppt tuitions as to the principle of inter- 
pretation to be adopted, and also as to the import of 
certain words descriptive of descent, which arc doubt- 
ful, and which often cannot be applied consistently 
throughout. 

It is, therefore, to be particularly noticed, and ever 
borne in mind, that the chronology inserted in the 
margin of our Authorised English Bible is no part of 
the Sacred Volume, and of no binding authority on the 
conscience, but a chain of human computations, approxi- 
mately correct for the most part, yet having some links 
which are but doubtful inferences, and some that an 4 
but little better than conjectures. Hence, should certain 



CHRONOLOGY, 391 

of these dates, such for example, as that given to the 
Deluge, or that of the dispersion of mankind at Babel, 
be proved erroneous, it would not in anywise affect the 
credibility of the Scriptures ; or, should the age which 
this chronology assigns to the human race be rejected 
as inadequate, it is not to be regarded necessarily as a 
rejection of the Bible. The narratives and statements 
of the Bible are of God, but the dates in its margin 
are of man, just as are its divisions into chapters and 
verses 

u It does not affect the respect due to the Book as an 
inspired volume of fact or doctrine, to consider its gen- 
eral chronology an open question. That it has been so 
considered and treated by some of the most pious and 
learned men is a fact well known to the Biblical stu- 
dent. When time is not the essence of a fact recorded, 
it is unimportant. There are few even of modern 
histories that harmonize in dates; yet no one doubts 
the facts they state. In this case, as in the kindred 
one of geological science, it would seem that the simple 
purpose for which the Book was written has been over- 
looked. The Bible was never intended to be a system 
of chronology, nor a treatise on Geology." * 

After the foregoing remarks, the reader will not be 
surprised to find that the most eminent chronologers 
differ in regard to the dates of not a few of the events 
and transactions noticed in the Scripture, according to 
the principle of interpretation they adopt, and the Text 



* Dr. Hawk's Monuments of Egypt, p. 30. 



392 



CHRONOLOGY. 



on which they base their calculations. The following 
are the dates given in the Hebrew and Greek Texts, 
to the principal events of the periods with which we 
shall be chiefly concerned in the discussions of this 
chapter. The figures indicate the age of each individual 
when the next was born. 



Befoke the Deluge. 



Adam 

Seth 

Enos 

Cainan 

Mahalaleel , 

Jared 

Enoch 

Methuselah 
Lamech — 

Noah 

Shem 



Sept. 


Heb. 


After the Deluge. 


Sept 


Heb. 


230 


130 




135 


35 


205 


105 


Cainan 


130 




190 


90 




130 


30 


170 


70 


Eber 


134 


34 


165 


65 




130 


30 


162 


162 


Reu 


132 


32 


165 


65 


Serug 


130 


30 


187 


187 




179 


29 


188 


182 


Terah 


70 


70 


502 


502 


Abram leaves Haran 


75 


75 


100 


100 










Abram arrives in Canaan . 1245 365 


2264 


1658 


This was 2 years after the Flood. 



Concerning these two chronologies we may observe, 
that strong doubts are entertained by Biblical critics 
concerning the authenticity of that based on the Hebrew 
Text, and that, compared with the longer chronology 
of the Greek or Septuagint, it is of modern adoption. 
The primitive Christian writers unanimously received 
and followed the Septuagint; and so do the most 
esteemed chronologers of the present day. Bede, the 

venerable monk of Durham, who flourished in the eighth 
century, was the first Christian writer who manifested 
n preference for the Hebrew; hut prior to the Reforma- 
tion lew shared in his views. When Luther roused the 



CHRONOLOGY. 393 

attention of Europe to the errors of the Church of Rome, 
the authority of the Greek version, as in all preceding 
ages, regulated all calculations concerning the age of the 
world, and the dates of the great events of Sacred His- 
tory. In the warmth of the controversy that ensued, 
some of the more rigid Protestants hastily pronounced the 
chronology of the Septuagint to be a Popish corruption, 
and threw their whole influence in favor of that of the 
Hebrew text, and in opposition to the Greek, though this 
had been held, with scarce a dissenting voice, by all 
Christians from the days of the Apostles. 

When or how these variations of the figures of the 
two versions of the Scriptures originated is not posi- 
tively known; some of them are suspected to be de- 
signed corruptions, and others the result of carelessness 
in transcribers. The testimony of Josephus, though a 
Hebrew, as a whole, is in favor of the Septuagint. The 
evidence of all ancient history and tradition likewise 
goes to confirm it. To this we may add, that the able 
writer of the article on " Chronology," in the last edition 
of Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, after thoroughly 
sifting all documents bearing on the subject, comes to 
this conclusion : " On the whole, therefore, we are 
inclined to prefer the Septuagint numbers after the 
Deluge, and as consistent with them, and probably of 
the same authority, those before the Deluge also." So 
far then as the Sacred Scriptures serve to supply us 
with a chronology, we may conclude that the figures 
found in the Greek version come nearest to the true 
dates of the events related. 



394 CHRONOLOGY. 

Considerable as is the extension of the Septuagint 
Chronology beyond that of the Hebrew, certain develop- 
ments made within the past few years demand, in the 
judgment of some, a much longer chronology even than 
this. The first grave doubts respecting the correctness 
of the commonly received dates of the creation of man, 
the deluge, and the dispersion of mankind, were sug- 
gested by the researches made into the histories and 
monumental inscriptions of the various nations of the 
East, particularly those of the Egyptians, Hindoos, and 
Chinese. Scholars found themselves unexpectedly car- 
ried back by these some thousands of years beyond what 
the standard chronology of Europe would allow, and 
could discover no satisfactory way of reconciling these 
widely different reckonings of time. The matter, how- 
ever, for some years made but little way beyond the 
limited circle of these students of oriental literature. 
But antiquarian research, or archaeology, as the pursuit 
is now more commonly termed, turned up from time to 
time other evidences of quite a different character, which 
seemed altogether to favor the longer chronologies of 
those ancient nations. In many parts of Europe, traces 
of man's bones, and of the works of man's hands, were 
found associated with the remains of various species of 
animals long ages since extinct, in caves, in mounds, in 
lakes, and sometimes buried at great depths beneath 
naturally formed strata of loam or gravel. Many of 
these relics, by their general appearance, or by the pecu- 
liarity of their construction, or by the circumstances in 
which they were found, are believed by many to carry 



CHRONOLOGY. 395 

back the date of man's origin very much further than 
was ever imagined before. 

Attempts not a few have been made by sceptics to 
array the above class of facts against the Sacred Volume, 
and by means of them to undermine all faith in its 
historic records. The vast antiquity held to be proved 
by them has been pitted against what have been termed 
the " comparatively modern dates " of the Bible, and the 
conclusion at once drawn therefrom, that it is no longer 
worthy of credence. A great parade of learning has fre- 
quently been made of late in this direction ; arguments 
of various sorts, garnished with scientific technicalities, 
have been thrust before the public as so many conclu- 
sive proofs that the " Old Book " is doomed to be soon 
cast aside as a thing of the past. To all this we have 
here simply to repeat what has already been said in 
substance, that whatever may be the truth concerning 
the antiquity which these records and relics serve to 
indicate, and whatever bearing they may have on the 
chronology commonly attached to the Bible, they do not, 
and cannot, in anywise or degree, affect the inspired 
Record itself. Though they should entirely change the 
earlier dates, and substitute others in their room, the 
Bible would still remain intact. The blow thus aimed 
at this holy Book hits quite another mark — it is what 
the computations of men say, and not what the in- 
spiration of God has given, that such assaults impugn. 
The friends of the Bible are quite as desirous to 
ascertain the correct dates of the great events spoken 
of in its early records, as are any of its enemies, 



396 CHRONOLOGY. 

come the information from what source or quarter it 
may. 

The genealogical tables of the Bible, being more or 
less incomplete, its most devoted friends have differed in 
their estimates of the periods "which they cover. " The 
extreme uncertainty attending all attempts to determine 
the chronology of the Bible," says Dr. Hodge, " is suf- 
ficiently evinced by the fact that one hundred and eighty 
different calculations have been made by Jewish and 
Christian authors, of the length of the period between 
Adam and Christ. The longest of them make it 6984, 
and the shortest 3483 years. Under these circumstances, 
it is very clear that the friends of the Bible have no 
occasion for uneasiness. If the facts' of science or of 
history should ultimately make it necessary to admit 
that eight or ten thousand years have elapsed since the 
creation of man, there is nothing in the Bible in the way 
of such concession. The Scriptures do not teach us how 
long men have existed on the earth. The tables of gene- 
alogy were intended to prove that Christ was the son of 
David and of the seed of Abraham, and not how 
many years have elapsed between the creation and the 
advent.' 1 * 

With these necessary preliminary remarks, we now 
come to the question proposed to be discussed, namely. 
What are the actual bearings of recenl developments on 
the antiquity of the human race? Do they in any way 
affect the credibility of the Bible history? Do they oiler 



* Systematic Theology^ Vol. [I,, p. 4L 



CHRONOLOGY. 397 

any certain or satisfactory evidence that man has been 
an inhabitant of the earth for a longer period than the 
Bible either allows or warrants us to believe ? 

In order to survey and understand as correctly as pos- 
sible the wide and obscure field to which this inquiry 
leads us, it is necessary that we take up our position 
upon firm ground, and as near as practicable to its con- 
fines. And this we shall now attempt to do. The 
' remotest standpoint or date, concerning which most 
chronologers are agreed, or at least are so nearly agreed 
that we may consider it as settled, is that of Abraham's 
arrival in the Land of Promise ; this we may put down, 
without material error one way or the other, as having 
taken place in the year 2000 B. c. — this being the mean 
of the dates given for this event by Hales, Jackson, 
Usher, and Petarius. This period is the beginning of 
reliable chronology, and this date is the earliest in the 
history of mankind on which we can safely stand. All 
dates beyond are involved in much doubt. 

Taking then our stand in time by the side of the 
" Father of the Faithful" on his arrival in the plain of 
Moreh, the centre of his promised inheritance, our first 
inquiry is, To what numbers had the family of Noah 
multiplied, and to what extent had they overspread the 
earth at that date ? We have no sources of information 
from which we can gather a definite or direct answer 
to this question. The history given us of the period 
intervening between the Flood and the arrival of this 
Patriarch in Canaan is extremely brief, being all compre- 
hended within three short chapters. The first of these 



308 CIJROXOLOGY. 

is occupied with a relation of the promises and instruc- 
tions with which Noah and his family left the ark, and 
commenced life on the reclaimed earth ; the second is 
taken up with the genealogies or the names of the tribes 
into which the descendants of his three sons divided; 
and the third is devoted to an account of the confusion 
of tongues, and a further genealogy of one branch of 
the family of Shem. This comprises all the information 
handed down to us of this period in the sacred history. 

In the genealogy of this one branch of the descendants 
of Shem, " we have a list of names, which are names and 
nothing more to us. It is a genealogy which neither 
does, nor professes to do, more than to trace the order of 
succession among a few families only out of the millions 
then already existing in the world. Nothing but this 
order of succession is given, nor is it at all certain that 
this order is consecutive or complete. Nothing is told us 
of all that lay behind that curtain of thick darkness, in 
front of which these names are made to pass. And yet 
there are, as it were, momentary liftings, through which 
we have glimpses of great movements which were going 
On, and had long been going on, beyond. No shapes are 
distinctly seen. Even the direction of those movements 
can be only guessed. But voices are heard, which are as 
the voices of many nations." * 

In the narrative of Abraham's call out of Haran, and 

of his subsequent movements in the Promised Land, we 

find several statements and numerous incidental allu- 



1 Prim val Wan, p. 81. 



CHRONOLOGY. 399 

sions, that plainly reveal the fact that in his day the 
human family had greatly multiplied and spread far and 
wide over the face of the earth. The land of his nativity 
appears to have been situated in the midst of an ex- 
tended region of vast population, and comprehending the 
territories of many independent kings; — here lay the 
dominions of Amraphel king of Shinar, Arioch king of 
Ellazar, Chedorlaomer king of Elam, Tidal, king of 
nations, and other kings probably more or less remote 
whose names are not mentioned. And scattered through 
these kingdoms were already many cities, among which 
we read the names of Ur, Babel, Erech, Accad, Calneh, 
Nineveh, etc. What the actual extent of these king- 
doms, or magnitude of these cities might have been, we 
have no means of ascertaining; but all these facts 
certainly indicate that this whole central region of 
Western Asia was quite thickly peopled, and that some 
at least of the above kingdoms were no mean powers ; 
such, we read, were the national strength and military 
resources of Chedorlaomer with his allies that he was 
able to carry on wars of conquest at the distance of many 
hundreds of miles from the seat of his government * 

As Abraham, in obedience to the Divine Call, jour- 
neyed southwestward toward the Land of Promise, at 
the distance of some 300 miles from his native Haran he 
passed by Damascus, already a place of note, and the 
centre of a busy population extending far on every side. 
And when he had advanced some 150 miles farther and 



* See Genesis xiv. 1-12. 



400 CIIK °^ 'OLOGY. 

arrived in Canaan, he found it no empty or desert 
country, but peoj3led by various tribes throughout its 
length and breadth. Along the Mediterranean coast, 
eve-n from Sidon to Gaza, stretched the flocks and herds 
of the Canaanites. Farther south still along the same 
coast was the dominion of Abimelec king of Gerar, whom 
Phicol served as the chief captain of his host. Inland 
and adjoining these extended the territory of Melchiz- 
edec king of Salem. East and southeast of the latter 
stretched the plains of Jordan and the region of the Salt 
Sea, studded with the cities of Sodom, Gomorrah, Adrnah, 
Zoar and Zeboim ; while far beyond lay the territory of 
Moab in one direction, and Mount Seir in another, 
peopled by tribes, whose accumulated wealth even then 
was sufficient temptation to draw upon them the in- 
vasion of distant kings. Thus the land of Canaan on 
Abraham's entrance into it wore everywhere the aspect 
of a long-settled and populous country. 

After a brief sojourn, Abraham was compelled by 
famine to leave this region, and seek sustenance for 
himself and household in the land of Egypt, a country 
sonic 250 miles still farther from his native home. In 
Egypt be found a great and strong nation, advanced in 
civilization and the arts, and living under a well-organ- 
[zed government, whose great cities with their palaces 

and temples plainly indicated that they had for many 

generations been dwellers in the land. 

So far, in this direction, hut how much farther WC 

cannot tell, had the descendants of Xoah already trav- 
elled and spread. And we have clear intimations in the 



CHRONOLOGY. 401 

tenth chapter of Genesis that they had in like man- 
ner advanced and spread in all other directions — the 
descendants of Japheth northward and westward toward 
Europe, and the "Isles of the Gentiles;" and those of 
Shem eastward and southward through Asia. Thus we 
gather, brief as the sacred history is, that in the day of 
Abraham, the human family had greatly multiplied, 
and overspread a very large portion of the habitable 
surface of the earth. And all this receives confirmation 
from the records and traditions of various nations. 

Now these vast numbers and this wide dispersion of 
the world's population at this early day, it is contended, 
present various difficulties which are irreconcilable with 
the Scripture history of our race, and are, therefore, fatal 
to its credibility. These difficulties we now propose to 
consider in their order. 

1. Difficulty in regard to the aggregate of the world's 
population. It is asserted that we have in the immense 
population of the globe at this date a proof conclusive 
of the incorrectness of the Bible history of mankind ; — 
that it would require a vastly longer period than that 
allowed by the Bible between the Flood and the Call 
of Abraham, for the single family of Noah to increase 
into such multitudes as had already taken possession 
of Asia, Europe and Africa. Hence, a much higher 
antiquity is claimed for the human race than the Bible 
is understood to allow. 

We admit that the length of time indicated by the 

common or Hebrew chronology, 428 years, is much too 

short for this great increase of the human family ; but 
26. 



402 CHRONOLOGY. 

we contend, and shall now undertake to prove, that the 
chronology based upon the Greek Text, which, for the 
reasons already given, we hold to be the more correct 
chronology of the Bible, allows an amply sufficient 
period, 1247 years, to account for all that we find in the 
world in the day of Abraham. 

Let us resort to figures, for the increase of human 
population has been reduced to a science. According to 
the high authority of Malthus, it is a proved fact that 
population tends to increase at the rate of doubling every 
twenty-five }^ears. That this rate of increase, excluding 
extraordinary destructions of life by war and pestilence 
and famine, is a fair estimate, might readily be shown 
from the statistics of various nations ; but perhaps no 
fact more satisfactory, or more in point, could be cited 
than that supplied by the interesting and romantic 
history of Pitcairn's Island, which was peopled by a 
remnant of the mutineers on the English ship Bounty } 
together with a few islanders that accompanied them. 
There landed on this lone and desolate isle, in the year 
1700, nine Englishmen, each with an Otaheitian wife: 
six Otaheitian men, three of them having wives; and 
one child ten months old: — in all, 28 souls. Though 
eleven of the men were cut off by mutual violence 
within the first year, vet the remainder, by the year 
L830, had increased to 7!) souls; by the year 1856 to 
104 souls; and by 1862 to 200 souls. That is, in 
Seventy-two years they amounted to more than tenfold 
the number that landed on the island, thus doubling in 
considerably less than every twenty- five years. If, 



CHRONOLOGY. 



403 



therefore, the populations of the crowded countries of 
Europe, as Malthus states, and if this little company on 
a desolate island, only four miles and a half in circum- 
ference, present such an increase, it is obvious that this 
rate, namely, doiiblincj every hcenty-five years, is a fair 
and safe basis for calculating the increase of Noah's 
descendants, who had all the world to themselves, and 
who, moreover, were favored with a measure of longevity 
far beyond what men attain in our day. From the deluge 
to Peleg, the period of procreation ordinarily ranged from 
one hundred to one hundred and fifty years. 

Now the problem before us is, allowing the family of 
Noah, eight souls, to increase at the rate of doubling 
every quarter of a century, what would be the earth's 
population at the end of 1247 years, or the time when 
Abraham entered Canaan ? On calculation we find 
that it would stand as follows : 

There would be in the world 128 souls at the end of 100 years. 



2,048 
32,768 
524,288 
8,388,608 
134,217,728 
2,147,483,648 
34,359,738,368 
549,755,813,888 
8,796,093,022,208 



200 
300 
400 
500 
600 
700 
800 
900 
1000 



But we need not carry out this calculation any further ; 
— the above figures are sufficient to show the rapid and 
enormous multiplication of men that would have taken 
place at the rate of doubling every twenty-five years. If 
now, in order to make full allowance for the destruction 



404 CHRONOLOGY. 

of life by the ravages of war, pestilence and famine, we 
say, that from the end of the fifth century after the 
Deluge, the population increased only at the rate of 
doubling once in fifty years ; * we should still have in 
the world, in the days of Abraham, a population far out- 
numbering what that of the whole globe is estimated to 
be at the present day. — There is, then, in the aggregate 
population of the world at the time under consideration, 
no ground whatever for argument or objection against 
the Bible history of our Race. 

2. Difficulty with regard to the antiquity of the Egyptian 
Monarchy, as indicated by its civilization, and recorded 
upon its monuments. Those who urge objection on this 
ground tell us that Egypt was an ancient kingdom when 
Abraham first arrived there ; that it had already been 
under the government of successive dynasties, embracing 
altogether a long list of kings, whose united reigns 
according to the hieroglyphic records amount to several 
thousands of years. And they further argue, that when 
the first of these monarchs assumed his regal power 
and position there must have been there a very consider- 
able population to constitute anything like a kingdom; 
and that this population again must have occupied 
many generations to increase to such numbers; and, 
finally, that behind all this there must have elapsed a 

long time before the first settlers could have reached a 

land so distant from the cradle of mankind. And thus 



* England, With ;ill her wars, has, within the past fifty years, more 
than doubled her population, beside sending upward of live millions 
away as emigrants to Other eountries. 



-CHRONOLOGY. 405 

it is contended that the history of the Egyptian nation 
carries us back far beyond the date which Scripture 
assigns to the Deluge. Hence, again, has been seized 
with avidity the conclusion that the Bible history of the 
human race cannot be true. 

In regard to the correctness of dates and periods 
derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, especially those 
embraced within its earlier history, there exists, as is 
well known, very great uncertainty. This is evident 
from the fact that the lengths of these periods according 
to one decipherer are twice, and even thrice, as great as 
the same periods are read by another decipherer. And 
not only this, but the same interpreter sometimes differs 
widely from himself; thus Bunsen, in his latest recension 
of Egyptian chronology, speaks of having " got rid legiti- 
mately of a considerable number of useless centuries." 
Differences so enormous in the reading of the same 
records cast complete doubt on the whole system of their 
interpretation. Add to all this, that it remains quite 
undetermined yet, whether many of those whose names 
are found in the lists of Egyptian kings were associate 
sovereigns of the same province, or contemporary Rulers 
of different provinces, or successors of one another over 
two or more kingdoms ; it is obvious, therefore, that any 
attempt to determine dates and periods from the reigns 
of these must be largely conjectural. Moreover, it is 
even uncertain whether Menes, the first of Egypt's 
mortal kings, whose reign is taken as the starting-point 
of all definite periods, was a real or a mythical personage: 
"The entire uncertainty of all that precedes Menes," 



40G CIIROXOLOGY. 

says Ken rick, " may even throw doubt on his own his- 
toric reality ; for we do not commonly find the darkness 
of. a mythic period succeeded at once by light and cer- 
taintj r ; " and the same writer intimates that his very 
name may be " fictitious." * 

Safe and reliable computations do not carry the foun- 
dation of the Egyptian monarchy further back than 700 
years before the visit of the Hebrew Patriarch. " Seven 
centuries before Abraham," says the Duke of Argyll, 
" is the estimate of Mr. Stuart Poole, of the British 
Museum, who is one of the very highest authorities, and 
certainly the most cautious, upon questions of Egyptian 
chronology." Admitting the reality of this monarch, 
and accepting this estimate, we have the reign of Menes 
beginning 2700 years before Christ, and 547 years after 
the Deluge. With these data, let us now inquire how 
we shall come out in regard to the population and 
civilization of Egypt. 

Egypt, as formed by Nature, was a country that 
offered many advantages and attractions. The climate 
was salubrious. Its Delta and Valley, for an extent of 
six hundred miles, watered and enriched by the Nile 
with its many branches, possessed a soil of unsurpassed 
fertility. In no country in the world could subsistence 

be obtained more easily. It was, therefore, likely to be 
peopled at a very early day. Let us now suppose (and 
none can question the reasonableness of the supposition), 
that at the end of two hundred years from the 4 Deluge, 



* Ancient K<j>ji>t under th< Pharaolis, Vol. II., pp. 0">, ( .x;. 



CHRONOLOGY. 407 

a little company of eight nomads with their Socks reached 
in their migrations the waters of the Nile, and fixed their 
habitation on its warm and luxuriant banks ; and that a 
similar company followed them and settled there at the 
end of every quarter of a century ; and that all these 
companies, from the respective dates of their arrival, 
went on increasing at the rate of doubling every twenty- 
five years. We should then have at the end of 350 
years, that is, at the commencement of the reign of 
Menes, a population of more than 260,000, — a very 
respectable foundation certainly for a kingdom in that 
early day of the world. 

If, now, from the accession of Menes, in order vo 
make ample deduction for extraordinary waste of life 
by tyranny, plagues and wars, we reduce the rate of in- 
crease to doubling only once in seventy-five years ; then at 
the end of seven centuries, that is, at the date of Abra- 
ham's visit, we should have a population of 133,000,000. 
And if we reduce this number again by one-half, to allow 
for those who might have wandered away to the West 
and to the South, agreeably to the statement of Strabo, to 
people the vast continent of Africa, there would still re- 
main in Egypt over 60,000,000 of inhabitants, — a popu- 
lation, surely, abundantly sufficient to account for all the 
wealth and power, cities and temples, and w r hatever else 
the Patriarch might have found there. 

But aside from the population, it is urged that the 
advanced state of Civilization and the Arts at this period, 
in Egypt, was such as would have required a much 
longer period to attain than what the Bible History 



408 CHRONOLOGY. 

allows. This objection is based on the assumption that 
the population of Egypt had their origin in a state of 
utter barbarism and ignorance — that they began at zero, 
and had to creep up to their knowledge of the arts, of 
science and government, by the slow and gradual pro- 
gress of indigenous experience, discovery and invention, 
a process naturally and necessarily so slow, we are told, 
that it would have required a long series of ages to reach 
the elevation at which they stood at this period. 

Now, all this is a mere supposition, a mere conjecture 
of the advocates of the theory of development. No facts, 
no evidence whatsoever, can be offered in proof of the 
hypothesis that Man's primitive condition was that of 
barbarism, and none certainly that the original settlers 
of Egypt were barbarians. It is plain from the Scrip- 
ture history that even before the Flood, the mechanical 
arts were in a good state of forwardness ; as early as the 
days of Lamech we read of artificers in brass and iron, 
and of the invention of musical instruments and the 
building of cities. And certainly a vessel of such stately 
dimensions as the Ark, with its upper and lower decks, 
and its manifold interior divisions and conveniences, 
required no ordinary mechanical skill for its const ruc- 
tion. And of this immense structure Noah was the 
master-builder, and his three sons probably his chief 

assistants. Now Noah survived the Deluge three cen- 
turies and a hall', and his son Shem oxer five centuries. 

Hence the knowledge acquired of the arts and other 
matters, before the Deluge, must have been transmitted 

through these and the other survivors to their descend- 



CHRONOLOGY. 409 

ants. The population of the world after the Deluge, 
therefore, must have started in the possession of 
a large amount, at least, of the knowledge and arts 
acquired before that event; they were no rude and 
ignorant barbarians ; accordingly we read soon after of 
their building of great cities, and of the Tower of Babel. 
And from among these immediate descendants of Noah 
went forth those who first settled in Egypt, carrying 
with them, no doubt, much valuable knowledge and ex- 
perience ; so that the original occupants of that country 
might have commenced life there under mental and 
material conditions, in the possession of knowledge and 
resources, favorable to rapid advancement in art, science, 
and government. Add to all this, that a fine climate, 
and the richness of the soil yielding them abundance of 
all kinds of food with the least possible amount of labor, 
allowed them plentiful leisure for study and the culti- 
vation of art and science. Here, then, were a people 
enjoying all necessary and all desirable advantages for 
rapid progress ; and, after the lapse of a thousand years, 
when Abraham sojourned among them, we might reasonar 
bly expect that that progress would be very considerable 
— fully equal to all that can be proved to have existed 
there in his time. In evidence of this, we may refer the 
reader to the progress made by the Greeks in the thou- 
sand years immediately preceding the Christian era; 
to the surprising growth and grandeur attained by the 
Romans within a thousand years from the founding of 
their city ; and to the advancement in numbers, wealth, 
and power, of the enslaved Hebrews, in the shorter 



410 CHRONOLOGY, 

period that intervened between the Exodus and the 
close of the magnificent reign of Solomon. 

It may here be observed, that, in support of the above 
objection, to many of the remains of ancient Egyptian 
art the most extravagant antiquity has been ascribed by 
certain archaeologists. These, however, of late, have 
been sufficiently refuted. " When Champollion, in the 
course of his researches into the Royal Rinys, came to 
read upon the Zodiac of Dendera, he found the title of 
Augustus Caesar ; while on that of Esneh, he read the 
name of Antonius. That temple, therefore, which ML 
Dupuis had declared to be 4000 years older than the 
Christian era, proved to have been built about the time 
of its commencement; and the edifice of Esneh, which 
had been profoundly demonstrated to be 17,000 years 
old when the Saviour came, was shown to belong to a 
period 140 years after His advent. And thus were 
exposed the pretence of learning and the insolence of 
arrogance on the part of a class of men who sought, by 
bold perversion and confident dogmatism, to distort all 
that Egypt might reveal, into testimony against the 
Bible."* Referring to this class of writers, Sir G. C. 
Lewis makes the following severe but just observation : 
" Egyptology has a historical method of its own. It 
recognizes none of the ordinary rules of evidence; the 
extent of its demands upon our credulity is almost un- 
bounded. Even the writers on ancient Italian ethnology 
are modest and tame in their hypotheses, compared with 



* Hawk's Egypt and its 3£onvsnent8 t p. 40. 



; CHRONOL CGY 411 

the Egyptologists. Under their potent logic all identity 
disappears; everything is subject to become anything 
but itself. Successive dynasties become contemporary 
dynasties ; one king becomes another king, or several 
other kings, or a fraction of another king; one name 
becomes another name; one number becomes another 
number ; one place becomes another place." * 

Much has been said to the same purpose, by this set 
of writers, about the antiquity of the Great Pyramid, 
but with how little foundation will appear from the 
statements of the following authorities. Not only the 
age, but even the name of the builder of this stupendous 
pile is a matter of doubt. Herodotus says that Cheops 
erected it; Diodorus that Chembes was its builder; 
and Pliny, after quoting the names of twelve authors 
who had written on the Pyramids, declares that the 
builders of them are unknown. 

Sir John Herschel and Professor Piazzi Smith have 
attempted to determine astronomically the age of the 
oldest Pyramid, and their calculations placed its erection 
between 2171 and 2123 b. c. But as the data upon 
which that calculation was based were uncertain, the 
conclusion of course must be equally so. Sir Charles 
Lyell, speaking of " the temples, obelisks, cities, tombs, 
and pyramids of Egypt," says, " the exact date of these, 
after they have been studied with so much patience and 
sagacity for centuries, remains uncertain and obscure." 
And Sir George Cornewall Lewis, in a recent work, 



* Historical Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients, p. 368. 



412 CHRONOLOGY. 

makes this statement: "Taking into consideration all 
the evidence respecting the buildings and great works 
of Egypt extant in the time of Herodotus, we may come 
to the conclusion that there is no sufficient ground for 
placing them at a date anterior to the building of the 
temple of Solomon, or b. c. 1012."* — Against the Holy 
Scriptures, then, no valid objection can be drawn from 
either the early settlement and civilization of Egypt, 
or from any of her stupendous works of art which still 
remain to be reckoned among the wonders of the world. 

3. Difficulty 'presented in the early occupation of China. 
The people and civilization of China are said to be almost 
as ancient as those of Egypt. Their history and tradi- 
tions together carry back their origin to very remote 
antiquity. The main difficulty, as regards the Bible, 
in connection with this people, is the great distance at 
which they appear at so early a day, namely, on the 
eastern borders of Asia, in a region separated by vast 
mountain ranges and the distance of thousands of miles 
from the country in which Noah and his family are sup- 
posed to have settled after the Flood. The date assigned 
by Scripture chronology to the Deluge is held to forbid 
the idea that it was possible for Noah's descendants to 
wander so far, and in such numbers, as to constitute a 
kingdom there at the early date claimed by Chinese 
history. 

Asiatic nations in general are prone to exaggerate 
their antiquity; and in this, the Chinese are no excep- 



JliatnricnJ Surra/ of (Ju Astronomy (f the Aiu-iails, p. 140. 



CHRONOLOGY. 413 

tion. This people, like the Hindoos, have their mytho- 
logical history, which deals in large chronological inter- 
vals, and runs back indefinitely into the dim obscurity 
of the past. According to the most recent and reliable 
investigations of European scholars, their actual exist- 
ence as a nation could not have been earlier than 2000 
b. c, and perhaps not quite so early as that. Their 
authentic records, however, do not extend beyond eight 
or nine centuries before the Christian era. Supposing, 
then, that the Chinese kingdom was founded about 2000 
years before the advent of our Saviour, the question is, 
Could the descendants of Noah, in the natural course 
of their migrations and dispersion, reach this remote 
country and so multiply there as to constitute anything 
like a kingdom by that date ? We think it quite credi- 
ble that they might have done so, and that without any 
extraordinary departure from the established habits of 
men in those primitive times. 

The nomadic people of those early days removed per- 
petually from one locality to another, according as they 
needed or found pasture and water for their flocks, often 
travelling considerable distances in the course of a few 
months. When Jacob lived at Hebron, his sons we 
read advanced with their sheep and cattle from stage to 
stage, till they reached the vales of Shechem, a distance 
of more than sixty miles from home. Abraham, long 
before, travelled in the same manner with all that he 
had down to Egypt, and from Egypt back again to " the 
place where his tent had been at the beginning, between 
Bethel and Hai," a distance of 250 miles. In cases of 



414 CHRONOLOGY. 

disagreement or war they frequently moved with con- 
siderable rapidity, and to remote localities, as did Jacob 
in his flight from Laban. In short, in those early ages, 
a large proportion of the people were in a state of per- 
petual migration. 

" In an early stage of society the necessity of hunting 
acts as a principle of repulsion, causing men to spread 
with greatest rapidity over a country, until the whole 
is covered with scattered settlements. It has been 
calculated that eight hundred acres of hunting-ground 
produce only as much food as half an acre of arable land. 
When the game has been in a great measure exhausted, 
and a state of pasturage succeeds, the several hunter 
tribes, being already scattered, may multiply in a short 
time into the greatest number which the pastoral state 
is capable of sustaining. The necessity, says Brand, 
thus imposed upon the two savage states, of dispersing 
themselves far and wide over the country, affords a 
reason why, at a very early period, the worst parts of 
the earth may have become inhabited." :;: 

Now, Noah and his family, after the Flood, are gen- 
erally supposed to have settled somewhere to the east 
of the region of Mesopotamia; the distance from this 
country in a direct course to the borders of China would 
be about 3600 miles. Now, supposing that the ad- 
vancing wave of the world's ever-increasing population 
travelled eastward at the rate of four miles a year — a 
most moderate supposition, for it would be only a hnn- 



* Lyell's Principles of Gculoyy, Vol. II., p. 471. 



CHRONOLOGY. 415 

dred miles for every doubling of the population — then 
the foremost would have reached China in something 
over nine centuries, or about the year 2400 b. c. Let 
us say, as we did in reference to Egypt, that the first 
band that arrived numbered eight souls only, and that 
these were followed by a similar company at each inter- 
val of twenty-five years, and that all from the time of 
their arrival multiplied at the rate of doubling every 
quarter of a century; then, in four hundred years, or 
by 2000 b. c, there would have been there a population 
of over one million. — Now, this result agrees remarkably 
well with the claims of Chinese history. In their Le 
IChee, it is stated, Dr. Marshman informs us, that at 
this period, the people were living as clans or tribes, in 
a very rude state, in woods and caves and holes dug 
in the ground ; that they covered themselves with skins 
of beasts, and rude garments formed of the leaves of the 
trees, grass and reeds; and that they neither practised nor 
understood the art of agriculture. In a recent communi- 
cation, a distinguished scholar, many years a resident in 
China, gives it as his opinion to the Duke of Argyll,* that 
" the Chinese Tribe was only beginning to grow into a 
kingdom about 2000 b. c, and that twelve hundred years 
later, the kingdom did not extend nearly so far south as 
the Yang-tsze River." — There is, then, so far as the Sacred 
Record is concerned, no serious or insurmountable diffi- 
culty either in the origin or in the history of this remark- 
able people; all that is known with certainty concerning 



* See Primeval Man, p. 90 — Note. 



416 CHRONOLOGY. 

them may be readily harmonized with the Scripture 
history of the human race. 

4. Difficulty suggested by the early development of Man- 
kind into distinct Races. The population of the whole 
earth having originated in one stock or family, namely, 
that of Noah, the differences in form and color which 
distinguish them into Races must have been produced, as 
already shown, under the influence of various physical 
conditions and different social habits. This process of 
variation is slow ; yet widely divergent features and com- 
plexions were developed in very early times. Among 
these stood notably the Negro type, which appears to 
have been established in the days of Jeremiah ; — " Can 
the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" 
was his exclamation to his incorrigible countrymen. And 
the pictorial records of Egypt contain representations 
of Negroes, with their black and peculiar features, some 
centuries still earlier. In the picture of Sethos I., before 
referred to, a Negro is depicted kneeling at his feet, who 
is said to exhibit all the distinctive characteristics of 
that Race — black face, woolly hair, ilat nose, and pro- 
jecting lips. All these peculiarities seemed to have 
been established thus early, that is about 1300 B. c. ; 
or, according to the conclusion of Sir George Cornewall 
Lewis, not earlier than 1012 B. c. Now it is asserted 
thai to produce this wide divergence between the de- 
scendants of Noah required a vastly longer period than 
that allowed by Scripture history, and consequently that 
the human family must be of vastly greater antiquity 
than the Bible represents. 



418 CIIROXOLOGY. 

That the human race exhibited very distinct varieties, 
and among them the Negro, at the period indicated by 
the above dates, there is no doubt; and there is just 
as little doubt that the physical differences which dis- 
tinguished those varieties have often been greatly ex- 
aggerated. In these Egyptian pictures, as all must see, 
there is much room for error and defect on the part of 
the artist, and not a little allowance to be made for the 
defacing influence of so long a period as thirty centuries 
of time. Any arguments of so serious a bearing as those 
designed against the credibility of the Scriptures as- 
suredly should rest on clear and certain bases. But 
what assurance have we of the skill or accuracy of these 
very ancient Egyptian artists, in the nice and difficult 
work of human portraiture? We are pointed to the 
decisive color of the figures ; but we ask, was the color- 
ing originally true to nature? was it of the right shade 
of blackness? Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians 
themselves had "curling hair and black complexions;" 
and Lucian adds, that they approached the Negro physi- 
ognomy in a, fulness of the lips," which may be re- 
marked in the Spktnx of the Pyramids, in the heads of 
sonic of the Egyptian sovereigns, and in many repre- 
sentations of individuals. AVas there, then, to the Egyp- 
tian artist no temptation to study effect, or to indulge 
in undue contrasts in his figures, giving to one a darker 
shade, and to another a lighter tint, in order to please 
or Batter his royal patrons? We often (ind the painters 
of modern times influenced by such considerations, and 
might not this have been the ease with those Egyptian 



CHRONOLOGY. 419 

painters ? And even if the color was originally correct, 
what assurance have we that the lapse of three thousand 
years has not served to render it many shades darker 
than it was at first ? And as to their forms — was there 
not an equal liability to error and imperfection in draw- 
ing these? What guarantee can be offered that these 




Sphinx. 



bare rough outlines found in these pictures are suffi- 
ciently accurate to be taken as a gauge or standard, by 
which the precise amount of variation the human face 
had undergone might be estimated? We well know 
that a slip of the pencil or of the chisel to the breadth 
of a hair about the eye, or the nose, or the mouth, 
is sufficient to change entirely the whole expression of 
the face. We simply intend by these remarks that 



420 CHRONOLOGY. 

considerations such as these are not to be overlooked in 
estimating the true amount of variation which the Races 
exhibited at that early period. 

To the above we may add the fact, that these pictures 
themselves vary one from another. There are, it is said, 
still earlier representations than the above of the Negro 
race, and which are referred to the twelfth dynasty, 
thus carrying back their date some five or six hundred 
years. In these, while the Negro color is strongly 
marked, it is curious to observe that the Negro features 
are hardly discernible ; from which we may infer that 
to bring these out more fully, as in the picture of Sethos, 
required the lapse of some five or six centuries more. 

Whatever of weight or force the objection based on 
the early development of Races may have is mainly lent 
to it by Ussher's short chronology — the period allowed 
by that between the Flood and the appearance of the 
Negro being regarded as too brief for the production of 
such a marked variety. But taking the longer and more 
coirect chronology of Hales or Jackson based on the 
Septuagint version, and we have from the Deluge to the 
time of Sethos I., a period of 2000 years, an abundant 
Length of time to account for all the difference of form 
and color that might have existed in that monarch's 
day. 

"A new Law is coming to view," says Principal Daw- 
son; ** it is (hat species, w hen first Introduced, have an 
innate power of expansion, which enables them rapidly 
to extend themselves to the hunts of their geographical 
range, ami also to reach the limits of their divergence 



CHRONOLOGY. 421 

into races. These limits once reached, the races run on 
in parallel lines until they one by one run out and dis- 
appear. According to this law, the most aberrant races 
of men might be developed in a few centuries, after 
which divergence would cease and the several lines of 
variation would remain permanent, at least so long as 
the conditions under which they originated remained. 
This new law, which was hinted at long ago by Hall, the 
Palaeontologist of New York, is coming more distinctly 
into view, and will probably altogether remain one of 
the imagined necessities of a great antiquity of man. It 
may prove also to be applicable to language as well as to 
physical characters." 

In the preceding chapter, on the Unity of Mankind, we 
have seen from authentic history that a far shorter 
period than 2000 years has served to turn white Jews 
into Hindoo blackness, and to convert the feeble, ill- 
formed and stupid Ostiaks into the noble and handsome 
race of the Hungarian nobility. These and the many 
other facts there adduced sufficiently answer the objec- 
tions from the early development of Races, which have 
been urged against the Scripture history, and in favor 
of an indefinite antiquity for the human family. 

5. Difficulty presented by the existence of various distinct 
Languages in very remote times. Those holding that all 
languages, like the different races of men, are simply 
and solely divergent growths from one primitive stock or 
tongue, claim, on the ground of the vast length of time 
they conceive necessary to develop after this manner 
these languages, that the human race must date back far 



422 CHRONOLOGY. 

beyond the period assigned in Scripture to the Deluge of 
Noah. 

Those who believe in the Bible, as the word of God, 
find no special difficulty in regard to the early existence 
of diverse languages. To them the confusion of tongues, 
by Divine interposition, at Babel, supplies a sufficient 
and satisfactory explanation of this matter. "And the 
Lord said, Behold the people is one, and they have all 
one language ; and this they begin to do : and now 
nothing will be restrained from them, which they have 
imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there con- 
found their language, that they may not understand one 
another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad 
from thence upon the face of all the earth. And they 
left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it 
called Babel (confusion), because the Lord did there 
confound the language of all the earth." * 

But those who raise and urge this objection, as a 
matter of course, refuse to accept this in anywise as an 
explanation. We have to meet them, therefore, on their 
own ground. They maintain that languages have been 
the product of slow variation in speech, carried on for 
ages in different directions among people living in dif- 
ferent regions, amid different circumstances, and follow- 
ing different modes of life; in other words, the growth of 
time and circumstances. The new scenes and objects 
amid which such tribes or nations would find themselves 

would call for new names, and new inventions, pursuits 



* Genesis xi. 1-9. 



CHRONOLOGY. 423 

and emergencies for new modes of expression. Old terms 
for convenience would be abbreviated or compounded, 
and pronunciation and inflection from taste or necessity 
be changed. Meanwhile other words and phrases and 
pronunciations would pass out of use, and be forgotten. 
Thus, perpetual variation would keep pace with the flow 
of time, so that in the course of successive generations, 
not only the form and sound of words, but also the 
very structure of a people's language would come to 
differ wholly from those of other people's separated from 
them during all these ages. The process would be 
gradual, and of necessity slow ; yet languages radically 
different are known to have been fully developed in 
very early times. According to the Arundelian marbles, 
Homer wrote in Greek his Iliad and Odyssey about the 
middle of the ninth century before Christ; the Vedas 
were written in Sanskrit, in the opinion of Miiller not 
later than 1200 b. c.; the Pentateuch in Hebrew as early 
as 1500 b. c.; and the Coptic was the living language of 
Egypt in the days of Joseph, or 1700 b. c. Now, it is 
maintained that the full development of these and other 
languages at these very early dates is altogether irrecon- 
cilable with the Bible chronology, and that the human 
race, therefore, must be of vastly greater antiquity than 
any legitimate interpretation of that book will allow. 

We admit that the above causes have been at all 
times and in all regions of the globe at work, slowly but 
constantly varying and multiplying human tongues. 
We believe that the language of a country, like its popu- 
lation, is in a state of perpetual fluctuation ; in the one, 



424 CHROXOLOGY. 

individuals are constantly dying and dropping away, 
while others are born and introduced upon the stage ; so, 
but more slowly, in the other, some words become obso- 
lete and forgotten, while new ones are coined and 
adopted. Conceding all this, we maintain nevertheless, 
that the length of time from the Flood down to Joseph 
— a period of 1500 years — even on this ground, was 
amply sufficient to account for all the diversity of 
tongues that can be shown to have existed in his day. 

Language, we have said, like those who use it, is in 
course of perpetual change. As the living population of 
no country can be said to be over 80 or 90 years 
old, so neither does the living language of any people 
run back beyond 800 or 900 years into the past. 
"None of the languages of modern Europe," says Lyell, 
"are a thousand years old. No English scholar who has 
not specially given himself up to the study of Anglo- 
Saxon can interpret the documents in which the chron- 
icles and laws of England were written in the days of 
King Alfred ; so that we may be sure that none of the 
English of the nineteenth century could converse with 
the subjects of that monarch if these last could now be 
restored to life." 

The same holds true of Germany. "They who 

now speak German, it' brought into contact with their 
Teutonic ancestors of the ninth century, would be quite 
unable to converse with them, and, in like manner, (ho 
subjects of Charlemagne could not have exchanged ideas 

with the Gothfl of Alaric's army, or with the soldiers of 

Arminius in the days of Augustus Caesar. So rapid. 



CHRONOLOGY. 425 

indeed, has been the change in Germany, that the epic 
poem called the Nibelungen Lied, once so popular, and 
only seven centuries old, cannot now be enjoyed except 
by the erudite. 

"If we turn to France, we meet again with similar 
evidence of ceaseless change. Chevalier Pertz has 
printed a treaty of peace a thousand years old, 
between Charles the Bold and King Louis of Germany 
(dated A. d. 841), in which the German king takes an 
oath in what was the French tongue of that day, while 
the French king swears in the German of the same era, 
and neither of these oaths would now convey a distinct 
meaning to any but the learned in these two countries. 

" So also in Italy. The modern Italian cannot be 
traced back much beyond the time of Dante, or some six 
centuries before our time. Even in Rome, where there 
had been no permanent intrusion of foreigners, such as 
the Lombard settlers of German origin in the plains of 
the Po, the common people of A. d. 1000 spoke quite a 
distinct language from that of their Eoman ancestors or 
their Italian descendants, as is shown by the celebrated 
chronicle of the monk Benedict of the Convent of St. 
Andrea on Mount Soracte, written in such barbarous 
Latin, and with such strange grammatical forms, that it 
requires a profoundly skilled linguist to decipher it."* 
So pass ancient languages out of use, and so spring up 
new ones in their stead. 

In view, then, of facts clear and definite and certain, 



* Ly ell's Antiquity of Man, pp. 459, 460. 



426 CHRONOLOGY. 

such as the above, the remote existence of distinct 
languages offers no foothold for serious objection to the 
Bible history of mankind. For it is manifest, that even 
by the early day of Abraham, twelve centuries after the 
Flood, the simple course of natural variation in human 
speech alone was fully adequate to develop numerous 
and distinct languages among the widely dispersed 
descendants of Noah. The author of The Genesis of the 
Earth and of Man, who has few equals as a linguist, 
speaking of the original language of Canaan (page 248), 
says : " Reckoning about seven centuries to have elapsed 
between the dispersion from Babel and the arrival of 
Abraham in Canaan, we have what we regard as a suf- 
ficient length of time for the gradual individualization 
of the Hebrew and the Aramaic, partly by means of 
natural development and partly by foreign influences ; 
and in like manner, and in about the same period, we 
may suppose the principal dialects of Arabia to have 
assumed their distinct individualities." 

Plainly connected with natural causes is to be recog- 
nized the Divine Hand in this matter. Speaking of the 
Scripture account of the confusion of tongues, Bunsen 
says: "It is truly wonderful — it is a matter of astonish- 
ment — it is more than a mere astounding fact that some- 
thing so purely historical, and yet divinely fixed — 
something so conformable to reason, and yet not to be 
conceived of as a mere natural development — is here 
related to us out of the oldest primeval period; and 
which now, for the first time, through the new science of 
philology, has become capable of being historically and 

philosophically explained," 



Archeology 

AND 

Primeval Man. 



For the last half -century, the occasional occurrence, in various parts of Europe, 
of the bones of man or of the works of his hands, in cave-breccias and stalactites, 
associated with the remains of the extinct hyena, bear, elephant or rhinoceros, has 
given rise to a suspicion that the date of man must be carried further back than 
we had heretofore imagined. — Lyell. 

427 



The Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages : The Relics regarded as carrying 
the antiquity of man beyond the blble record — i. the danish 
Peat Beds ; 2. The Danish Shell Mounds ; 3. Swiss Lake-Dwell- 
ings; 4. Discoveries in the Valley of the Mississippi; 5. The 
Valley of the Nile and its relics; 6. Cave Bones and Imple- 
ments : Siberian Carcasses. 



4,8 



Archeology 

AND 

Primeval Man. 



HE term Archaeology was confined, until a 
comparatively recent period, to the study 
of Roman, Greek and Egyptian art. The 
word, however, literally signifies the descrip- 
tion of ancient things ; and it has now been 
universally adopted in its largest sense to 
give name to the science which deduces 
history from the relics of the past. 

The science of Archaeology is closely connected with 
that of Geology ; they are like two successive links in a 
chain of investigation, the earliest data of the archaeolo- 
gist being found exactly where those of the geologist 
end — in the later alluvial formations of the earth's 
surface. 

A desire to know something — to know all that can 
be known — concerning those who have occupied the 
earth before us, is quite natural to all men, as natural 
as to inquire what shall come to pass in the future. 

429 




430 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

Hence the peculiar interest with which history has ever 
been read. And hence, too, after having traced all written 
records back to their remotest dates, this yearning after 
further acquaintance with our ancestors in the distant 
past, has led inquiring minds to lay hold with avidity 
on whatever offered to help them to pierce still beyond 
into pre-historic time. And within the past half a cen- 
tury many interesting relics of man, and many curious 
articles of his workmanship, have been brought to light, 
not a few of which are supposed to antedate the earliest 
periods of written history. And among the many in- 
ferences that have been drawn from these remains of 
antiquity is this, that Man must have been a tenant 
of the earth for a period immensely longer than that 
indicated by the Bible history. 

The Bible, it will be borne in mind, according to the 
chronology based on the Greek version, places the crea- 
tion of Man 2262 years before the Deluge, 5509 years 
before Christ, and 7382 years before the present writing. 
And the position we take, and which we shall now 
undertake to establish is, that no discoveries yet made 
invalidate these figures, or offer anything deserving the 
name of proof that the human Race is of higher antiquity 

than these dates 'will eover. 

Ancient remains, such as arms, implements, ornaments 
and oilier articles of man's workmanship, of which a 
iii-eat number and variety have been discovered in dif- 
ferent countries, have been by antiquarians classified 
under three heads, according as they are made of stone, 
bronze, or iron; and those included respectively in these 



AkCH&OLOGY. 431 

classes are held to represent three successive stages 
in human progress, and each stage to have extended 
through an indefinite number of ages, while all three 
added together give to Man as an occupant of this planet 
an antiquity that is appalling to contemplate. In dis- 
cussing this matter, then, we ask the reader's attention 
first to this classification. 

The Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. — The advocates of 
Man's great antiquity assume that he first appeared 
among the living tenants of our globe in a state but a 
little above that of a mere brute, with mental faculties 
so contracted and moral perceptions so faint, as to be 
" scarcely worthy to be called a man." At first, picked- 
up stones with a suitable surface, or a convenient point, 
or a sharp edge, were his only implements ; in process 
of time he reached the thought and acquired the ability 
of improving these by splitting, chipping, or rubbing 
them with other stones, and finally by polishing them : 
this was The Stone Age. 

After long and slow progress in the use of stones, he 
advanced to a higher stage ; he became acquainted with 
copper, and learned to make use of it ; this in time he 
managed to improve by an admixture of tin with it, 
thus converting it into bronze. The great number 
and variety of objects found of this alloyed metal are 
regarded as indicating a very long period in its use : 
this was The Bronze Age. 

At length a time arrived when another forward step 
was taken; bronze in its turn gave way to iron, the 
latter being found far better for the manufacture of tools, 



432 ARC HAL OLOGY. 

weapons and all kinds of cutting instruments ; and this 
remains in use to the present day : this is The Iron A<j< . 

These three "ages "are held to represent, not only 
so many stages of improvement in art, but also three 
very distinct periods of time in the history of our Race. 
Accordingly antiquarians have proceeded to establish 
for various countries a system of chronology on this 
basis. Any tomb or mound, for example, in Denmark, 
containing traces of iron, is ascribed to the Iron Age, 
which is supposed to go back to about the beginning of 
the Christian era; those containing arms, or implements, 
or ornaments of bronze, are assigned to the Bronze Age, 
a period of from one to two thousand years preceding 
that era ; and those devoid of all traces of metal of any 
kind are put down as dating from the Stone Age, which 
embraced all previous time of man's occupation of that 
part of the world, amounting it might be to two, five, or 
even ten thousand years. Such is the theory of the 
Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. 

Now, all this, let it be observed, is not established 
truth or fact, but a mere hypothesis or conjecture. Unit 
man began his existence as a savage — that the meagre 
and dubious relics of the so called Stone Age represent 
his condition in the first period of his history — that this 
stone age was at any time universal on the earth — that 
all nations have passed through these successive ages — 
that they represent any definite or definable period- of 
human history; all this is sheer assumption. "They 
talk," says the Duke of Argyll, "of an Old Stone Age, 
and of a Newer Stone Age, and of a Bronze Age, and 



ARCHALOLOGY. 433 

of an Iron Age : now there is no proof whatever that 
such ages ever existed in the world." * 

Admitting that mankind have passed through these 
several stages, they offer no possible ground or data for 
calculating the age of the race in general, or of any 
nation in particular. For, as human improvement from 
one into another would have been a gradual and con- 
tinuous process, these ages (supposing them to have 
existed) must have overlapped, intermingled, and faded 
one into the other as undefinably as the colors in the 
rainbow ; no lines could be drawn between them from 
which their respective breadths could be estimated. 
Again, among a people living in a country of rich soil, 
genial climate, and abounding with favorable materials, 
invention and progress might have gone on far more 
rapidly than among others, whose lot, in these respects, 
was the reverse of all this. Hence the Stone, or the 
Bronze, or the Iron Age of a nation such as the former, 
might not have been one-fourth, or one-half, or even 
one-tenth as long as the corresponding age to a nation 
such as the latter. It follows further from this, that 
what was an age of stone in one part of the world might 
have been an age of iron in another ; and this beyond 
doubt was actually the fact. At the period in which 
Archseologists represent the northern nations of Europe 
as having no better tools or arms than those made of 
flint or bone, the Egyptian and Assyrian Empires we 
know had their arms and chariots of iron ; and at the 



28 



* Primeval Man, p. 180. 



434 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

date when the Britons and Scandinavians are said to 
have been in their Bronze Age, the Hebrews, Etruscans 
and Phenicians bent their bows of steel. In short, these 
"Ages "may be found co-existing on the earth at this 
very day. Even the Stone Age is not altogether gone 
by yet. The sun of yesterday in his circuit round the 
globe looked down and beheld in this region the Loco- 
motive, the Iron Steamer, and the rifled cannon, and in 
that the thonged sledge, the log canoe, and the flint- 
pointed arrow ; while its beams fell upon gold and silver 
coinage circulating among one people, and upon beads 
and cowries passing as currency among another. — From 
all this, it is sufficiently obvious that these ages of Stone 
and Bronze and Iron as measures, or even as indications 
of the lapse of time, are utterly indefinite, and that no 
calculation of the a^e of the human race or of a solitary 
nation, can be based upon them. 

The remoteness of the earliest of the periods that 
archaeologists would represent by these "three ages' 1 
has, undoubtedly, been vastly overestimated by many 
of them. We need not quit the light of history and 
plunge into the obscurity of unrecorded or imaginary 
ages, to find the nations foremost in civilization using 
both bronze and stone implements. 

Stone implements continued in use to the t attle of 
Hastings, in England, and to the wars of Wallace 1 , in 
Scotland." - The Latin poets and historians, while the 

arms and instruments they describe arc for the most 



• Sec Thi Celt, th< Roman, ewid ti« r>rit<>n, p. 72, 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 435 

part of iron, yet speak of those made of bronze ; Virgil 
gives bronze arms to the warriors of his iEneid as well 
as to some of the people of Italy. Going back to the 
earlier writers of Greece, we meet with more frequent 
mention of bronze. Hesiod, writing 850 b. c, mentions 
a time when bronze was the prevailing metal in use. 
And Homer, a century earlier, though both bronze and 
iron were known in his day, speaks of the sling as an 
important weapon of war, and describes his heroes as 
throwing stones at each other. And rough purposes, 
such as those of war, were not the only uses made of 
stones; they were often formed into instruments for 
cutting, drilling and piercing other materials. Solemn 
treaties among the Romans were, according to Livy, 
ratified by the sacrificing of a hog with a " sharp stone " 
during the Punic wars. And if we go back to the time 
of Moses, though both iron and bronze are repeatedly 
mentioned in the Pentateuch, we shall find the Hebrews 
on several occasions using knives of stone. The rite of 
circumcision as practised by them when they came out 
of Egypt was performed with sharp stones or flint, and 
notably in the case of Joshua circumcising the children 
of Israel at Gilgal. * In the account of Joshua's burial, 
as given in the Septuagint version, it is stated that the 
stone Tcnives were laid in his tomb. And we have no 
reason to doubt that stone knives and stone implements 
were in frequent use among other and surrounding 
nations also at that day. Stone arrow-heads have been 

* See Joshua v. 2, 3. The English Bible here has " sharp knives," but 
in the Hebrew the words are charboth tsurim, Knives of rock or flint. 



436 AR cnyE ology. 

found occasionally even in the tombs of the ancient 
Egyptians. We see then that authentic history carries 
us back, not only to the age of bronze, but to the 
use of stone weapons and stone knives. Yet had the 
sharp flints employed to circumcise Israel at Gilgal been 
stumbled upon, or had the stone knives buried beside 
the Leader of God's people been by chance discovered, 
we have much reason to apprehend that floods of ink 
had been shed, and treasures of learning expended by 
some archaeologists, to prove them relics of a mysterious 
antiquity, probably antedating the Deluge by some 
thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. 

Moses flourished some 1700 years after the Deluge ; 
and if stone instruments were thus employed in his day, 
in the central and most enlightened region of the earth, 
we may reasonably suppose that in preceding ages they 
were in much more common use, especially among those 
ruder tribes that had wandered into distant parts, such 
as those that followed the streams of the Volga, the 
Danube, and other rivers into the deep forests and 
among the remote mountains of Europe. During these 
seventeen centuries, then, and the next thousand years 
that followed, there elapsed time enough assuredly for 
the fabrication and deposit of all the stone implements 
and other relies of man that have yet been discovered in 
that quarter of the globe. 

Leaving now these imaginary k * Aires" in human pro- 
gress, we advance to consider severally the particular 
archaeological discoveries, which are regarded as offering 

the strongest proof that the human Race is of greater 



ARCHEOLOGY. 437 

antiquity than can be reconciled with the Bible 
history. 

1. Danish Peat-Beds. — In various parts of Denmark 
there are to be met with deposits of peat, occupying 
natural depressions or hollows in the surface of the 
ground. These vary in depth from ten to thirty feet. 
Low down in them are found trunks of Scotch fir ; this 
tree is not now a native of the Danish Islands. Higher 
in the deposit, trunks of the common oak are discovered, 
which is now a rare tree in the country. Higher still 
lie the remains of the beech, which still lives and flour- 
ishes there. Mixed up with these are many human 
relics; these differ in their character, and are said to 
correspond with the different ages of the vegetation ; a 
flint instrument was found close to the trunk of a fir 
tree, bronze implements have been taken out of the 
peat at the depth in which oaks abound, while traces of 
iron have been found only among the beech or near the 
surface. In these relics antiquarians recognize at once 
the Stone, the Bronze and the Iron Age ; and upon 
these deposits of peat and the relics they contain has 
been based a calculation, or rather, as we should say, a 
conjecture, that gives to Man an antiquity that is 
measured by tens of thousands of years. We are called 
upon first to consider the vast length of time required 
for the slow growth of this great depth of peat; and then, 
to deepen our impression of this lapse of time, we are 
bidden to reflect upon the cycles of ages that must have 
passed away during the growth, continuance and extinc- 
tion of these three successive classes of vegetation, the 



438 ARCILEOLOGY. 

very last of which alone, the beech, carrying us back 
beyond the Christian era — how far into the past, then, 
must we travel to find the beginning of the oak ? and 
we have not yet reached the advent of man into these 
islands, for he roamed amid the dark and moaning 
forests of pine that flourished long before even all this ! 
Such is the train of reflection on which some of our 
antiquarians would set us. 

While all this may seem plausible reasoning, it is 
reasoning that has no better foundation than the peat- 
bog upon which it is employed. Let us look at the 
several particulars involved. As to the time assigned 
for the growth or deposit of the peat, it is simply a guess, 
for we have no data on which to base any calculation. 
In certain localities and under certain circumstances this 
may go on much faster or much slower than in other 
localities and circumstances. " Differences in the humid- 
ity of the climate, or in the intensity and duration of 
summer's heat and winter's cold, as well as diversity in 
the species of plants which most abound, would cause 
the peat to grow more or less rapidly, not only when we 
compare two distinct countries in Europe, but the same 
country at two successive periods."* Such is the testi- 
mony of Sir Charles Lyell. And Carl Vbgt Bpeaking 
on this subject says, " We neither know generally 
wit hin what time a stratum of peat one loot thick may 
grow, nor do we possess any Scientific data to calculate 
the quantity of growth within a given time of any indi- 



* Antiquity of Man, p. 111. 



ARCHEOLOGY. 439 

vidual peat-moor ; that the growth must differ in various 
moors ; that even in a given locality it must have dif- 
fered during certain periods, is easily imaginable." * In 
further refutation of the extravagant estimates made by 
De Perthes and others of the time required for the 
deposit of peat, Ave may add a well-established fact : 
" The overthrow of a forest by a storm, about the middle 
of the seventeenth century, gave rise to a peat-moss near 
Lochbroom in Ross-shire, Scotland, where in less than 
half a century after the fall of the trees, the inhabitants 
dug peat." f 

As to the succession of forest trees in the Danish peat, 
the fir, the oak and the beech, no great lapse of time is 
necessary to produce two changes, such as are here sup- 
posed ; a single generation in a rapidly cleared country 
will witness one such change. Farms cleared in many 
parts of the United States, and then abandoned, have 
been known in the course of a few years to send up a 
crop of trees altogether different from those of the 
original forest that grew there. The chestnuts of the 
forests of Virginia, east of the Blue Ridge, and of the 
Mississippi, die, and pines grow upon their remains. 

In parts of Southern Ohio, a forest of unmixed locust- 
trees follows the destruction of the ordinary mixed 
forest. Dwight, in his Travels, gives an account of the 
appearance of a fine growth of hickory on lands in Ver- 
mont which had been permitted to lie waste, when no 
such trees were known in the primitive forest within a 

* Anthropological Beview, No. 17, p. 209. 

f Lyell's Principles of Geology, Vol. II., p. 505. 



4 40 ARCHsE OLOGY. 

distance of fifty miles. The same authority also relates 
the appearance of a field of white pines, on suspension 
of cultivation, in the midst of a region where the native 
growth was exclusively of angiospermous trees. Caesar 
affirms that in his time both the beech and the fir were 
wanting in England; but both we know have now 
abounded there for many centuries. 

And as to the human remains in the peat-beds of Den- 
mark, allowing that the first occupants of that country 
were a low and ignorant tribe, using stone implements 
only, we are by no means necessitated to believe or 
to admit that these must have continued there through 
long and slow ages of improvement, in order to account 
for the bronze articles ; the country while in their pos- 
session might have been invaded and taken by a more 
intelligent and civilized race, who introduced at once 
arms and implements of bronze; and in a similar way 
these again might have been overcome by ethers still 
superior to themselves, who introduced as suddenly the 
knowledge and use of iron tools and weapons. Nothing 
in human history has been more common throughout the 
world than for the strong thus to invade and occupy the 
territory of the weak, carrying with them their habits, 
their arts and their civilization. Or, the primitive 
inhabitants of Denmark, as has often happened, might 
have acquired their know ledge of these metals, and of 

the uses to which they might be put, from some other 
more advanced people, and by peaceful traffic with them 
in the course of a single generation bring them into 
general use among themselves. That these successive 



ARCHEOLOGY. 441 

stages of improvement from the use of stone implements 
to that of bronze, and from bronze to iron, were native 
growths, is a mere assumption, and an assumption, too, 
against strong probabilities. — "Conquest alone," says a 
writer in the London Quarterly, " would serve to explain 
the apparent connection between a change of vegetation 
and a change in human implements; for an invading 
tribe would be very likely to destroy forests which har- 
bored the native inhabitants, extirpating one and sub- 
jecting the other contemporaneously." 

2. The Danish Shell-Mounds. — Along the shores of 
nearly all the Danish Islands, peculiar mounds of various 
forms and sizes may be seen, consisting mainly of vast 
numbers of cast-away shells of the oyster, cockle, and 
other mollusks, of the same species as those which are 
now eaten by man. These mounds vary in height from 
three to ten feet, and are some of them 1000 feet long and 
from 150 to 200 feet wide. They are rarely situated more 
than ten feet above the level of the sea, and are confined 
to its immediate neighborhood. The name given by the 
Danes to these mounds is Kjokkenmodding, or " kitchen- 
refuse-heaps." 

The shells of which they chiefly consist are plentifully 
mixed up with the bones of various quadrupeds, birds 
and fish, which served as the food of the rude hunters 
and fishers by whom the mounds were accumulated. 
Scattered all through them also are flint knives, hatchets, 
and other instruments of stone, horn, wood and bone, with 
fragments of coarse pottery, mixed with charcoal and 
cinders, but with no implements of either iron or bronze. 



442 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

Now, the arguments offered to prove the great anti- 
quity of the builders of these mounds are based on these 
three things, the stone implements, the animal remains, 
and the size of the shells, which are found in them. 

As to the " flint knives, stone hatchets," etc., it is 
plain from what has already been stated, that no very 
extraordinary antiquity can be claimed for these, as such 
instruments have been in use in all historic ages, and 
are in use even now in some parts of the world. The 
colonists of Austin, as late as 1822, had to fight with 
the Carancahuas and other tribes of Indians in Texas, 
armed with bows and arrows with flint points, barbed 
and shaped like those found at Abbeville in France, and 
scattered over the surface and imbedded in the alluvium 
of the whole continent of North America. The wander- 
ing nomads of the Southwestern Prairies made, and used 
for hunting and fighting, the same stone weapons at a 
later period still. 

The same may be said of the animal remains. All 
quadrupeds, whose bones have been found in these heaps, 
belong to species known to have inhabited Europe within 
the memory of man, excepting one, the wild bull (Bos 
Urus), but even this animal was seen by Julius Caesar, 
and survived long after his time. Among the bones of 
birds are many of the auk or penguin, now supposed to 
be extinct in Europe, but survived till Lately in Ireland, 
and still survives in Greenland. Remains of the beaver, 
red deer, lynx, fox and wolf are plentiful; but of no 
domestic animal save the dog has any trace been found. 
There is, therefore, among all these animal remains 



ARCHIE OLOGY. 443 

nothing that can be counted as indicating high an- 
tiquity. 

And as to the shells — these are regarded as offering 
the strongest proof of antiquity; all that have been 
found are of species still living. Among them is the 
common eatable oyster in its full size ; but this cannot 
live at present in the brackish waters of the Baltic, 
except near its entrance, where the ocean pours in a 
great body of salt water ; yet during the whole time the 
shell mounds were accumulating, the oyster must have 
flourished in those localities where it cannot now live. 
So also the eatable cockle, mussel and periwinkle are 
found in great numbers and of full ocean size in the 
refuse heaps, " whereas the same species now living in 
the adjoining parts of the Baltic only attain a third of 
their natural size, being stunted and dwarfed in their 
growth by the quantity of fresh water poured by rivers 
into that inland sea." From these facts it is inferred 
that since the days of the primitive hunters and fishers 
of the Danish Isles, a great change must have taken 
place in the relation of the Baltic to the North Sea; 
that formerly the waters of the latter must have had 
a much freer access into those of the former than at 
present; and that to effect this physical change must 
have occupied a very lengthy period of time. 

Such a change in the relative elevation of sea and 
land as is supposed in this inference does not necessarily 
imply a vast period. Established facts, indeed, indicate 
the contrary, and that the salt water of the ocean rushed 
into the Baltic basin at no very remote period; Sir Charles 



444 AR CH ^ OLOGY. 

Lyell tells us that even in the course of the present 
century, the salt waters have made one eruption into 
the Baltic by the Limfiord. It is also affirmed that 
other channels were open in historical times which are 
now silted up." And the same author, speaking of the 
oscillations to which this northwest quarter of Europe 
is subject, says, " The level of the land may oscillate ; 
and for centuries there may be a depression, and after- 
wards a re-elevation of the same district. Some phe- 
nomena in the neighborhood of Stockholm appear to me 
only explicable on the supposition of the alternate rising 
and sinking of the ground since the country was inhab- 
ited by man." * Now, all this may be, and naturally 
would be equally true of the neighboring peninsula of 
Jutland, which stretches its length between the ocean 
and the entrance of the Baltic. There are, in fact, clear 
evidences that this district is at present actually rising 
from the sea. — No very great lapse of time, therefore, is 
necessary to account for the change in the saltness of 
this inland sheet of water. 

Large heaps of oyster and other marine shells, similar 
to those of the Danish islands, containing various Hint 
and stone implements, are to be found in the United 
States, both in Massachusetts and in Georgia, left by the 
native Indians, at points near to which they were in the 
habit of pitching their wigwams. "At the present day, 

there are tribes of Indians in British North America, 

who form such refuse heaps still; while contemporary 



♦See J'riuripks of (holo<ji/, Vol. II., Chap. XXXI.— 11th Ed. 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 445 

with them, there are others who have no such customs. 
Would any one, therefore, be warranted to conclude that 
these refuse-heap makers are greatly more ancient than 
the others ? " * And as for the extinction of the oyster 
along the Danish shore, the fact offers no ground what- 
ever for inferring any great antiquity. " In Maine," 
says Professor Hitchcock, " we can prove that the oyster 
became thus nearly extinct within the time of the white 
population." 

3. Swiss Lake-Dwellings. — These were discovered and 
brought to notice some twenty years ago. The winter 
of 1854 was remarkably dry in Switzerland, the lakes 
and rivers fell far below their usual level, and the in- 
habitants of Meilen, on the Lake of Zurich, resolved to 
raise the level of some ground and turn it into land, by 
overlaying it with mud obtained by dredging in the 
adjoining shallow water. In carrying on these dredging 
operations they discovered a number of wooden piles 
deeply driven into the bed of the lake. These, as soon 
became evident, had supported human dwellings. Among 
the piles hundreds of implements, resembling those of 
the Danish shell-mounds, were dredged up with the mud, 
such as hammers, axes, celts, and other instruments. 

These discoveries led to the exploration of many other 
lakes, which resulted in similar developments. No less 
than two hundred distinct settlements have been found 
in these various waters ; and it is believed that as many 
as three hundred wooden huts were sometimes comprised 



* Professor Duns' Science and Christian Thought, p. 228. 



ARCHEOLOGY. 447 

in one settlement. These huts rested on platforms 
which were supported by the piles, and were connected 
with the shore by a narrow causeway of similar forma- 
tion, which could be withdrawn at pleasure. 

At the bottom of the Lake of Bienne, a canoe was 
found, made of the trunk of a single tree, fifty feet long 
and three and a half feet wide, which seemed to have 
been capsized when laden with stones. 

At Wangen, on Lake Constance, among the remains 
of an aquatic village, hatchets of serpentine, and arrow- 
heads of quartz were dredged up. Here, too, fragments 
of a kind of cloth, supposed to be of flax, not woven, but 
plaited, were detected. Carbonized wheat, barley, and 
grains of another kind, together with flat round cakes 
of bread, have also been met with, showing plainly that 
the inhabitants were tillers of the ground, and cultivated 
these cereals. 

Carbonized apples and pears of small size, such as still 
grow in the Swiss forests, stones of the wild plum, seeds 
of the raspberry and blackberry, and beech-nuts, also 
occur in the mud, and hazel-nuts in great plenty. 

Near Morges, in the Lake of Geneva, no less than 
forty hatchets of bronze were dredged up, and in many 
other localities the number and variety of weapons and 
utensils discovered, in a fine state of preservation, is 
truly astonishing. 

In some of these water-settlements, a mixture of bronze 
and iron implements and works of art have been found, 
including coins and medals of bronze and silver, struck 
at Marseilles, and of Greek manufacture, belonging to 
the early Roman period. 



448 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

The remains of a great variety of animals have been 
met with ; Riitimeyer enumerates twenty-four species of 
mammalia, eighteen species of birds, three of reptiles, 
and nine of fresh-water fish. All these are found still 
living in Europe. 

In all these aquatic villages, even in the very earliest 
of them, several domestic animals have been found. The 
ox, sheep, goat, the horse, the ass and the dog have been 
recognized. The goose and the duck are also frequently 
met with. In a few places traces of the domestic cat 
likewise have been observed. 

Amidst all this profusion of bones, but very few 
belonging to Man have been discovered. A skull, how- 
ever, in a good state of preservation was taken up from 
Lake Zurich, at Meilen, and has been carefully examined 
by several. Professor His pronounces it of a type very 
like that which prevails among the living population of 
Switzerland ; so that as far as any conclusion can be 
drawn from a single specimen, there has been no marked 
change in the form of the inhabitants of that country 
since the period of the Lake-dwellings. 

Such, in brief, are the celebrated Swiss Lake-liabita- ' 
tions, and the discoveries that have been made in con- 
nection with them. Now, our point is, what bearing 
have all these on the question of Man's antiquity ? A 
careful consideration of all the facts leads us to the 
following replies : 

We find here no ecu-tain evidence of any very high 
antiquity. These aquatic settlements -appear to have 
been occupied by one generation after another, and the 



archal ol og y. 449 

relics of these dropping successively to the bottom of the 
water, have become so confusedly mingled, that no 
definite conclusion can be reached, at least in regard to 
many of them, as to the time in which they were built 
or destroyed. Like villages on the land, their origins 
doubtless date from different periods. Some of them 
clearly belong to the earlier times of the Romans, 
and some of them to the latter; those of Noville and 
Chevannes are referred by antiquarians to the sixth 
century of the Christian era. 

The coins, medals, and articles of iron found, speak for 
themselves, and offer unquestionable evidence that they 
belong to a comparatively recent period, and one of an 
advanced state of art and civilization. 

The cultivation of the cereals, and the presence of all 
the modern domestic animals, plainly point to a similar 
condition of things. The occupants of these Lake- 
dwellings were no mere savages; as Oswald Heer informs 
us, they raised two distinct breeds of cattle, cultivated 
five kinds of wheat, and three kinds of barley ; among 
them was the wheat commonly called Egyptian, a fact 
leading to the inference that the Lake-dwellers had 
either come originally from the south, or had intercourse 
with some southern people. 

Even their stone implements imply acquaintance and 
intercourse with remote countries. The flint, of which 
they formed various articles, must have come from a 
considerable distance, probably from the south of France. 
And the jade, from which they made hatchets and 
wedges, is not to be found in Switzerland nor in any of 

29 



450 ARCHEOLOGY. 

the adjoining parts of Europe. The amber, likewise, 
which has repeatedly been found, it is supposed must 
have been imported from the shores of the Baltic. — All 
these things seem to bring the earliest of the lake 
settlements within the pale of a comparatively modern 
civilization. 

" These aboriginal Swiss," says Professor E. Fontaine, 
" certainly lived before the conquest of the Helvetii, or 
half a century prior to the Christian era ; and they may 
possibly have been contemporary with the Pceonians of 
Lake Prasias, mentioned by Herodotus, who about 520 
b. c. lived, he tells us, in houses which ' were built on a 
platform of wood supported by wooden stakes, while a 
narrow bridge, which could be withdrawn at pleasure, 
communicated with the shore.' "* Herodotus further 
informs us that these Pceonians preserved their indepen- 
dence during the Persian invasion, and defied the 
attacks of Xerxes by the aid of the peculiar position of 
their dwellings. 

From all that has yet been discovered in connection 
w r ith these pile habitations of the Swiss Lakes no proof 
can be derived of any very high antiquity, — certainly 
none that affects the chronology of Scripture history. 

4. The Mississi ppi Discoveries, — The Valley and Delta 
of the "Great Father of Waters" have been a fertile field 
for theories. From time to time various strange dis- 
coveries therein have been reported, and more than once 

the public have been startled by the learned calculations 



* HOW the World was PtOpkd^ p. 69. 



ARCHEOLOGY. 451 

sent forth of the vast antiquity of some of these ; and by 
the sceptical they have been seized and hastily con- 
strued into evidence against the Bible account of the 
origin of the human race. To notice severally these re- 
markable discoveries, and the wild calculations based 
upon them, would be tedious and unnecessary. Our pur- 
pose will be fully answered by a reference to one or two 
of them, as this will sufficiently show what estimate 
should be set on the rest. 

One instance of which we are about to speak was of 
so marked a character as to attract the attention of such 
a man as Sir Charles Lyell, and to secure a notice in his 
great work on the antiquity of Man. Speaking of the 
great Valley he says, " In several sections, both natural 
in the banks of the Mississippi and its numerous arms, 
and where artificial canals had been cut, I observed erect 
stumps of trees, with their roots attached, buried in 
strata at different heights, one over the other. I also 
remarked that many cypresses which had been cut 
through exhibited many hundreds of rings of annual 
growth, and it then struck me that nowhere in the 
world could the geologist enjoy a more favorable oppor- 
tunity for estimating in years the duration of certain 
portions of the recent epoch." This statement is made 
with reference to and in connection with a discovery 
then recently made in an excavation at New Orleans, 
for certain gas-works. " In this excavation," he says, "at 
the depth of sixteen feet from the surface, beneath four 
buried forests superimposed one upon the other, the work- 
men found some charcoal and a human skeleton, the 



452 ARCHEOLOGY. 

cranium of which is said to belong to the aboriginal type 
of the Red Indian race. The chronological calculations 
of Dr. Dowler ascribe to this skeleton an antiquity of 
50,000 years." While Lyell refrains from expressing 
his opinion of this astounding calculation, he deems it of 
sufficient value to give it a place in his book. But to 
show how unreliable and baseless such a computation 
is, w r e need but state a few well-known facts. 

In the lower part of its course, that is, below r Cairo, 
the Mississippi flows through a low, flat, and recently 
formed alluvium, varying in width from twenty-five to 
fifty miles; in this it perpetually shifts its channel, 
deviating on this side or on that from ten to twenty 
miles in less than one century. In times of high water 
it undermines its banks, and often engulfs acres together 
of the forest or plantation that may lie along its flood. 
In this w r ay, ancient mounds and modern graveyards are 
promiscuously swept aw r ay, whilst the forsaken portions 
of its bed, being composed of the richest soil, speedily 
send up rank vegetation which in the course of a few 
years obliterates every trace of the stream. Indeed, this 
work of destruction and renovation is accomplished so 
rapidly, that vessels now navigate its deepest current 
where forests grew or plantations flourished twenty 
years ago. When this river was surveyed by the United 
States government some fifty years since, all its islands 

were numbered from the confluence of the Missouri to the 
sea; but every season makes such revolutions, not only 
in the number but in the magnitude and situation of 

these islands, that this enumeration is now almost obso- 



ARCHEOLOGY. 453 

lete. Sometimes large islands are entirely melted away; 
at other places they have attached themselves to the 
main shore, or, which is the more correct statement, the 
interval has been filled up by myriads of logs cemented 
together by mud and rubbish. 

From these facts it is sufficiently evident that no 
reliable calculation can be made as to the age of any 
relic, whether of man or of beast or of vegetable growth, 
which may be found buried in such a loose and movable 
soil. The remains of trees that grew and of animals that 
lived in localities separated by hundreds of miles, or at 
periods divided by thousands of years, when swept down 
as far as New Orleans or the Delta, may be found lying 
side by side ; or, even the more recent relic buried at 
the depth of a hundred feet, while the more ancient 
occupies a grave quite near the surface. 

" The age of no fossil," says Professor E. Fontaine, 
" found in the alluvium of the present Delta of Louisi- 
ana can be determined. The average depth of the 
river is about 100 feet for the lower 125 miles of its 
course, and its bottom current flows as swiftly as its 
surface, and the average velocity is about four miles per 
hour. Opposite New Orleans, the soundings for Har- 
rison's Map of 1847, in the New Orleans Academy of 
Sciences, showed a depth of from 162 to 187 feet. Mr. 
Alfred Hennen, who had lived in the city sixty years, in 
1867 told me that he recollected when the deep channel 
of the river flowed where Tchoupitoulas street is now 
built, in the heart of the business part of it, a quarter of 
a mile from the present . shore. By undermining and 



454 ARC/IDEOLOGY. 

engulfing its banks, with everything upon them, logs 
tangled in vines, and bedded in mud, cypress-stumps, 
Indian graves, and modern works of art, are suddenly 
swallowed up and buried, at all depths, by its waters, 
from 10 to 187 feet. The deep channel then works its 
way from them, and leaves them beneath a deep soil of 
inconceivable fertility, which quickly produces above 
them a dense forest of rapid and short-lived growth; 
first of cypress, remote from the shore, with willows and 
cotton-wood next to its receding current ; then of live- 
oak, hackberry, and elm, with a variety of other trees. 
But the restless and resistless giant soon returns with a 
sweeping curve, and invades the land of the oaks, and of 
the cypress also ; and undoes quickly all the work of a 
quarter of a century, or of an age, to do it over again. In 
1856, an artesian auger penetrated a cedar log eighteen 
inches thick, which it had buried 157 feet beneath the 
pavement of Canal street. In digging the foundation of 
the gas works (referred to by Lyell), among burnt wood, 
cypress logs, and materials of all kinds floated from the 
great valley above, the skeleton of a man was found, 
and which was buried sixteen feet beneath the surface. 
This created much wonder ; and Dr. Dowler and others, 
who believe the pre -Adamite existence of men in 
America, decided that he belonged to k the aboriginal 
American race,' and supposed, witli Dr. Nott and Glid- 
don, that he had lain in that sjx>t 57,600 years! Similar 
specimens of antiquity may be found, and probably more 
abundantly, between the present leree and Tchoupitou- 

las street, where the whole area, to the depth of more 



ARCHEOLOGY. 455 

than 100 feet, has certainly been deposited within the 
period of sixty years. 

u Since the gas works were constructed, New Orleans 
Academy of Sciences was agitated by a report that, in 
making some deep excavations at Fort J ackson, at a con- 
siderable distance from the Mississippi River, and at a 
depth of fifteen or twenty feet below the surface, a piece 
of wood had been exhumed, which had evidently been 
shaped by ' human art/ and dressed with 4 tools/ which 
indicated the work of ' a highly civilized race of men/ 
It was at once decided by the advocates of the pre- 
Adamite origin of the autochthones of America, that these 
aborigines, who had inhabited Louisiana 57,600 years 
ago, were an exceedingly cultivated and highly enlight- 
ened people. Several members of the Academy deter- 
mined to examine the matter thoroughly, and to ascertain 
what specimen of ancient human art had been turned up 
by the spade at Fort Jackson. They found the facts 
precisely as stated. A large piece of yellow poplar had 
been unburied at a great depth, and considerable dis- 
tance from the river — a distance as great as that occu- 
pied by the aboriginal mound in the graveyard of Point 
a la Hache, above the Forts. It was squared with a 
broad-axe, bored with an auger, cut with a hand-saw, 
and was unmistakably — the gunwale of a Kentucky 
flat-boat ! 

" Fort Jackson was built after the battle of New Or- 
leans, in 1815; and from 1785 to the present year, the 
Father of Waters has been carefully fossilizing the 
evidences of the flat-boat trade between the great valley 



456 ARC HAL OLOGY. 

and New Orleans, and burying at all depths, from 1G to 
1G0 feet, and at all distances from his present bed, from 
one mile to twenty, the wrecks of the bodies of the boat- 
men and of their vessels. This immense mass of allu- 
vium, more than three times the thickness of that of 
the Nile, is all stratified like it, and the layers are colored 
differently by the variously-tinted waters of its tribu- 
taries, like the Nilotic deposits."* — Such are a few 
specimens of the facts that have been adduced for the 
overthrow of the Bible account of the origin of the 
human race, and from them, both the enemy and the 
friend of that Sacred Volume may well learn a lesson of 
wisdom. 

5. Yalley of the Nile. — The whole surface of this, like 
the valley of the Mississippi, is a rich alluvial deposit, 
brought down by the annual inundations of the Nile. 
Two French savans have applied themselves to deter- 
mine the rate at which this has been accumulating. M. 
Girard, of the French expedition, decided that between 
Asouan and Cairo, it raises the surface of the valley 
only five inches in a century; and M. Rosiere, in his 
great work on Egypt, has put down the rate of sediment 
deposited in the Delta at two Indus and three lines in a 
cent my. Taking these refined estimates as fixed bases, 
many and marvellous have been the calculations made 
respecting the antiquity of certain fragments <>f brick 
and pottery brought to light, according to the depths at 
which they were found in the alluvium. 



* llvu: the World was Vtophd, pp. 85-87. 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 457 

Not very many years since, a piece of pottery — 
"clearly of human workmanship" — was brought up, it 
was said, from a depth of ninety feet under the alluvial 
deposit of the Nile. Calculations were immediately set 
on foot to determine its age, which, according to one or 
other of the above scales, was placed at figures so enor- 
mous, that many were staggered at the idea that man 
had existed upon the earth through such vast periods. 
Happily, however, they were soon relieved, for the said 
piece of pottery, upon more careful investigation, was 
proved to be of Roman origin — a fact that forcibly 
reminds us of the Kentucky Flat-boat story. 

Between the years 1851 and 1854, under the direction 
of the Royal Society, and the supervision of Mr. Leonard 
Horner, "two sets of shafts and borings were sunk at 
intervals in lines crossing the great valley from east to 
west. One of these consisted of no less than fifty-one 
pits and artesian perforations, made where the valley is 
sixteen miles wide from side to side between the Arabian 
and Libyan deserts, in the latitude of Heliopolis, about 
eight miles above the apex of the Delta. The other line 
of borings and pits, twenty-seven in number, was in the 
parallel of Memphis, where the valley is only five miles 
broad. In some instances the excavations were on a 
large scale for the first sixteen or twenty-four feet, in 
which cases jars, vases, pots, and a small human figure in 
burnt clay, a copper knife, and other entire articles were 
dug up ; but when water soaking through from the Nile 
was reached, the boring instrument used was too small 
to allow of more than fragments of works of art being 



458 ARCHJE OL OG Y. 

brought up. Pieces of burnt brick and pottery were 
extracted almost everywhere, and from all depths, even 
where they sank sixty feet below the surface towards 
the central parts of the valley. All the remains of 
organic bodies, such as land-shells, and the bones of 
quadrupeds, found during the excavations, belonged to 
living species. Bones of the ox, hog, dog, dromedary 
and ass were not uncommon ; but no vestiges of extinct 
mammalia." 

Now, taking the scale of six inches rise by sedimentary 
deposit in a century, the fragments of brick and pottery 
above mentioned brought up from the depth of sixty 
feet, have been put down as 12,000 years old ! 

Another fragment of red brick, we are told, was found 
by Lint Bey, at the depth of seventy-two feet, and two 
hundred metres distant from the river. And taking the 
rate of deposit for the spot where it was found at two 
and a half inches, it has been calculated that this must 
have been buried over 30,000 years ago ! 

These are alarming figures to be put forth on a single 
datum, and that of a very doubtful character. The rates 
of deposit estimated by Girard and Rosiere have been 
pronounced by high authorities as vague and founded on 
insufficient evidence; and this, of course, strikes at the 
root of all calculations based upon them. 

The sediment of the Nile is derived from its bed and 

banks, as well as from those of its tributaries in the 

higher part of its course; now the longer these are worn 
and washed by repeated Hoods the less loose material 
remains within their reach and power to be carried 



ARCHEOLOGY. 459 

down. In the course of long periods, therefore, the 
amount of alluvium deposited during the annual inun- 
dations in Egypt must naturally be reduced. Hence, 
even if these estimated rates of deposit approximated 
correctness for the present age, they would prove nothing 
in regard to the rate in ages long since gone by, when it 
might, as is obvious, through various causes, have gone 
on at a much more rapid rate. 

Kenrick states that " the earthy matters which the 
water contains are deposited in different quantities and 
proportions in the vicinity of the river and at a distance 
from it. The largest quantity settles close to the stream, 
the smallest at the edge of the inundation. The annual 
deposit varies in the same situation from an inch to a 
few lines? * Let us take an average between these — 
a low average — say four lines, or one-third of an inch ; 
then, according to this rate, if we go back a period of 
2160 years, we shall find the surface just sixty feet lower 
than it is at present, which is exactly the depth of the 
lowest relic of brick or pottery found by the Royal 
Society in its borings. 

Much stress is laid by Mr. Leonard Horner, at whose 
suggestion the above borings were undertaken, on the 
pieces of burnt brick found; and calculating after the 
above method, he has carried back their date to twice 
the distance of Adam, forgetting or else unaware that 
there is no evidence that the Egyptians in early times 
used any but crude or sun-dried brick, a burnt brick 



* Ancient Egypt under the Pharaohs,Yol. L, p. 67. 



460 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

being as sure a record of the Roman dominion as an 
imperial coin. When Sir R. Stephenson was engineer- 
ing in the neighborhood of Damietta, he found, at a 
greater depth than Mr. Horner reached, a brick bearing 
on it the stamp of Mohammed Ali.* 

In the deepest boring of all, at the foot of the statue 
of Rameses II., the discovery of the Grecian honey- 
suckle, marked on some of those mysterious fragments 
which were asserted to be pre-historic, proved to have 
been no older than the age of Alexander the Great. 

To say no more of these calculations, it is quite possi- 
ble that the particular borings, whence these few and 
insignificant fragments were brought up, might have hit 
upon some of the ancient canals or reservoirs, into the 
bottom of which they had been washed ; or, peradven- 
ture, upon the sites of old wells, from which the Egyptians 
were in the habit of drawing water in earthen vessels. 

But all such fragmentary works of human hands 
fmnd in Egypt, at whatever depth buried, may be 
readily and rationally accounted for without insisting 
on any of these considerations, as the productions of 
historic times. The Nile, like the great river of North 
America, flowing through loose alluvial soil, has doubt- 
less many times shifted its channel ; during one inunda- 
tion wearing away the bank on this side, and during 
another on that side; and thus, like the Mississippi, 
engulfed and buried whatever might have stood upon 

them. "The effects of such n mighty volume ofwater,' 1 



London (Jimrtt rh/ //< r/< to, No. 51. 1866, 



ARCHEOLOGY. 4(31 

says Kenrick, " upon the surface of the country through 
which it is discharged are great; the bank of sand 
deposited by one flood is mined and scattered by another; 
and thus its materials gradually travel onward towards 
their final resting-place in the sea, or in places which 
the river subsequently abandons. Sometimes the Nile 
exceeds its normal height and reaches thirty feet, spread- 
ing devastation over the country. Houses are under- 
mined, cattle are drowned, and the stored-up produce of 
former years swept away." * If we suppose all this to 
have been going on only for the last two or three thou- 
sand years, we have in it abundantly sufficient to 
account for all the relics that have been or are yet likely 
to be exhumed in this ancient land. We need not resort 
to baseless calculations, or to the fabulous chronology 
to which such calculations lead. As in the valley and 
delta of the Mississippi, so in the valley and delta of 
the Nile, the handiworks of man may have been thus 
swept and buried at all depths and all distances along 
its course. 

6. Cave Bones and Implements. — In the limestone 
formations all over Europe, large fissures are to be found, 
often widening into caves, which contain deposits of 
gravel and mud, evidently brought there by water, 
covered by a layer of stalagmite, f The contents of 



* Egypt under the Pharaohs, Vol. I., pp. 71, 72. 

f Water in percolating through the rocks dissolves and carries with it 
more or less of the lime in them ; this falling on the floor of a cave, in 
time, forms a hard and crystallized incrustation over it, and this is called 
Stalagmite; that formed on the roof of a cave is termed Stalactite. 



462 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

many of these caves have been carefully examined by 
scientific men; and the results have been singularly 
uniform. The bones of man and the implements of his 
hands have been found everywhere mixed with the bones 
of recent and extinct animals. 

In 1833, Dr. Schmerling of Liege published the results 
of his examination of upwards of forty caves in the basin 
of the River Meuse. From this work it appears that the 
floors of many of the caverns were of unbroken stalag- 
mite; that in the cave -earth below this, he found 
remains of extinct and recent animals commingled, and 
with them in a few of the caves, the bones of man, in- 
cluding skulls, teeth, and bones of the extremities ; that 
the human remains were of the same color, and in the 
same condition as to the amount of gelatine they con- 
tained, as those of the accompanying animals; that they 
were so rolled and scattered as to show that they were 
not intentionally buried on the spot; that rude flint 
implements of various sorts were dispersed generally 
through the cave-earth in all the caverns ; and that in 
the cave of Chokier, he discovered a polished and jointed 
needle-shaped bone, with a hole pierced obliquely 
through its base. Among the animals whose bones Dr. 
Schmerling found in these caves were extinct species of 
elephant, rhinoceros, bear, tiger and hyena. 

Numerous caves containing a similar mixture of 
human and brute remains have been discovered and 
examined also in England, Wales and other conn tries. 
A brief description of two or three of these with their 
contents will serve to convey a general idea of all. 



ARCHEOLOGY. 433 

On the southern shore of England, overhanging Torbay, 
is a steep limestone hill, at the foot and on the slope of 
which is the town of Brixham. Close to the summit of 
this hill, a cavernous hollow was accidentally discovered 
in 1857, which, in the following year, was carefully 
examined by an able committee appointed by the Geo- 
logical Society of London. In it they found first, or 
uppermost, a floor of stalagmite, varying from a few 
inches to a foot in thickness ; in this several bones were 
found, and among them was a fine antler of a reindeer, 
firmly cemented to it, but rising in bold relief from its 
upper surface ; and a humerus of the extinct bear lying 
completely within it, about midway in its thickness. 
Under the stalagmite was a layer of cave-earth, from one 
to fifteen feet in thickness ; in this were discovered bones 
of the elephant or mammoth, of the rhinoceros, cave- 
bear, hyena, reindeer, cave-lion, a species of horse, ox, 
and several rodents ; but the object of greatest interest 
was the entire left hind leg of the cave-bear, having all 
the bones, even to the smallest, in their natural positions 
and connections. Under the cave-earth again was a bed 
of gravel ; some bones were detected in this, but none of 
importance. No human bones were found, but many 
flint knives, chiefly from the lowest part of the cave- 
earth, and one of the most perfect lay at the depth of 
thirteen feet from the surface. The hill in which this 
cavern is situated is separated from all higher ground by 
valleys, which are at least sixty feet below the level of 
the cave, yet it is evident that it has once been the 
channel of a stream, and that all these relics were car- 



464 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

ried into it by water. It is apparent, therefore, that 
since running water coursed through this limestone hill, 
the face of the country has undergone a great change. 

In cutting a water-course for a paper-mill, at Wells, 
England, some twenty years since, a cavernous fissure 
choked up to the roof with ossiferous loam, was unex- 
pectedly exposed to view. It measured nine feet in 
height and thirty-sixth in width. The red loam or mud 
with which it was almost filled abounded in fossil 
remains. Here were confusedly mixed the bones of 
elephants, rhinoceroses, bears, wolves, elks, foxes, &c. 
The bones of the hyena were in such numbers as to lead 
to the conclusion that the cavern had long been a den of 
these beasts. Intermixed with all the above fossil 
bones were various works of human hands, arrow-heads 
made of bone, many chipped flints, chipped pieces of 
chert, and a white-flint spear-head. At the distance of 
thirty-four feet from the entrance the cave bifurcated, 
one branch taking a vertical direction, and through this, 
it was supposed, the contents had been introduced. 

Equally interesting discoveries have likewise been 
made on the peninsula of Gower, Glamorganshire, Wales. 
Here are several subterranean chambers, in which 
have been found the remains of almost every quadru- 
ped elsewhere found fossil in British eaves. In the 
fissure called Raven's Cliff, teeth of hippopotami, both 
young and old, were found. From another fissure, 
called BoSCo's Den, no less than one thousand antlers of 
the reindeer were extracted J these were mostly shed 
horns, and of young animals, and had been washed into 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 465 

the rent with other bones, and fragments of limestone, 
and all enveloped in the same ochreous mud. Here also 
were found several well-shaped flint knives. 

On the western side of the beautiful Yale of Ilsham, 
where it opens upon the shore of the English Channel, 
stands a small wooded limestone hill, containing a large 
cavern, which, under the name of Kent's Hole, has been 
known from time immemorial, and during nearly half a 
century has attracted the attention of geologists and 
antiquarians. In 1864, the British Association appointed 
a committee to explore and examine this cave, and 
placed at their disposal a liberal sum of money for this 
purpose. From the stated reports of this committee to the 
Association we extract the following interesting facts. * 

Kent's Hole has two entrances ; these are 54 feet 
apart, but nearly on the same level, being a little over 
60 feet above the bottom of the adjacent valley. The 
cavern consists of two parallel divisions, each containing 
several chambers and galleries ; the researches have 
mainly been carried on in the eastern division, the 
extreme length of which is 285 feet, greatest breadth 
90 feet, and greatest height 22 feet. The deposits with 
their contents, as found by the committee, we now give 
in their descending order. 

First, or uppermost, Blochs of Limestone, fallen from 
the roof, of irregular forms, and weighing from a few 
pounds to fifty and even a hundred tons. 

Second, beneath and between these blocks, a layer of 



* See Eeports of the British Association for 1865-1869. 

30 



4G6 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

Blade Mould varying from three to twelve inches deep. 
In this was found a large assemblage of artificial objects, 
belonging to times all the way back to the Romans, and 
some to ante-Roman times. Here were miscellaneously 
scattered human vertebra?, jaws, teeth and portions of 
skulls; remains of bat, badger, fox, hare, rabbit, pig, sheep, 
birds and fishes; terrestrial and marine shells; whet- 
stones and polishing-stones ; spindle whorls made of dif- 
ferent kinds of stone, some plain and others ornamented ; 
amber beads; bone awls, chisels and combs, the last 
being made of the form and size of a common shoe-lifter, 
and having the teeth at the broad end ; bronze articles, 
including rings, a fibula, spoon, spear-head, socketed celt, 
and pin; portions of cakes of smelted copper; and a great 
number and variety of potsherds, including Samian ware. 

Third, a Stalagmite floor, in which were imbedded and 
enclosed charred wood, marine and land shells ; remains 
of various mammals, including the extinct cave-bear, 
hyena, woolly rhinoceros and mammoth; and a portion 
of a human upper jaw containing four teeth, with a 
loose tooth lying near it — this jaw was near the under 
side of the stalagmite, where it was twenty inches 
thick. 

Fourth, a Blade Band, composed mainly of small 
pieces of charred wood, and about three or four inches 
thick. This was a ideal deposit of an irregular outline, 
comprehending some ten or twelve square yards, and 
situated about 30 feet fiwwn the entrance, In this 
were found a large number of Hint implements; hone 
tools, including a well-formed awl, a fish-spear barbed on 



4G8 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

one side ; and a portion of a needle having a nicely made 
eye capable of carrying fine twine ; also remains of 
rhinoceros, hyena, deer, horse and ox. 

Fifth, Cave-earth, consisting of red ochreous loam 
mingled with fragments of limestone and rounded 
pebbles of grit, quartz, and slate. This bed contained a 
harvest of animal remains, including extinct species of 
the mammoth, cave-bear, etc.; recent species no longer 
existing in the British Isles, as the reindeer, wolf, etc. ; 
and recent species still inhabiting those islands, such as 
the badger, fox, etc. The remains of the horse and 
rhinoceros were extremely abundant, but were probably 
surpassed by those of the cave-hyena, whose presence 
was further represented by the bones which he had 
gnawed as well as by his bony faeces. The bones lay 
together without anything like order; remnants of 
different species were constantly commingled, and in no 
instance was there met with anything approaching a 
complete skeleton. Mixed with them, and at all depths 
to which the cave-earth was excavated, indications of 
Man were everywhere found. They consisted of oval 
and pointed implements of flint, chipped into form 
apparently with great labor and care ; stone hammer or 
crusher which had seen considerable service; whet- 
stones; bone pin, and two bone harpoons, one of them 
barbed on both sides, the other on one side only — these 
three hone implements were found directly under the 
black band above mentioned : the single barbed harpoon 
was one foot deep in the cave-earthj that doubly barbed 
was two feet deep, and the bone pin was found four feet 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 4(59 

deep, at the very bottom of the excavation, where it lay 
in contact with the molar tooth of a young rhinoceros. 

Sixth, a second Stalagmite Jhor, sometimes more than 
three feet thick, and of a highly crystalline structure. 
This was struck in the southern part of this division of 
the cave. This contained quite as many bones as the 
first stalagmite layer, but so far as examined, they 
belonged to the cave-bear only. 

Seventh, a Breccia, beneath the second stalagmite floor, 
composed of red loam, mixed with angular and rounded 
stones, and the whole cemented firmly together. This is 
of unknown depth. This equalled, if it did not surpass, 
the cave-earth in the number of bones buried in it ; but 
there was no variety, all belonged to the cave-bear and 
lay in the most confused manner. 

There are evidences of the action of water in this cave 
also. Most of the red loam and rounded stones, and 
probably many of the relics, were washed in, if not by 
a perennial stream, yet by occasional floods rising to 
sufficient height to flow in at the two entrances. 

Such are the relics of man and beast found in Caves. 
But it is not in the dark recesses of underground vaults 
and tunnels only that such remains have been discovered ; 
similar things have been met with in the valleys and 
beds and drifts of many rivers. " Throughout a large 
portion of Europe," says Sir Charles Lyell, " we find at 
moderate elevations above the present river channels, 
usually at a height of less than forty feet, but sometimes 
much higher, beds of gravel, sand and loam, containing 
bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, horse, ox, and other 



470 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

quadrupeds, some of extinct, others of living species." 
With these are frequently mingled flint implements of 
various kinds, as in the caves. Both are sometimes 
found in remnants of drift beds hanging like small 
terraces upon the sloping sides of valleys, from ten to a 
hundred feet above the level of the streams that flow 
through them. In such situations many flint imple- 
ments and animal remains have, within the past twenty- 
five years, been discovered in the valley of the Somme 
in France. Sometimes both kinds of relics are found 
buried deep in the bottom alluvium through which the 
rivers now flow; this is the case along the Thames; 
many bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, 
and other animals, have been found in the gravel on 
which London stands ; they have been dug up on the 
site of Waterloo Place, St. James' Square, Charing Cross, 
Bethnal Green, and the London Docks; and in the 
British Museum is laid up a flint weapon of the spear- 
head form, which was found with an elephant's tooth, 
near Gray's Inn Lane, in the heart of the city. Similar 
discoveries have been made in the valley of the Ouse 
and several other streams. 

Now in regard to these relics, whether found in caves 
or valley drifts and deposits, it is necessary to observe 
that the fact that the implements or bones of man lie 
together, or in the same situation as the remains of ex- 
tinct animals, is not always to be regarded a proof that 
man and such animals must have been contemporaneous. 
They may have lived in ages far distant, and died in 
localities widely separated, and yet their remains through 



ARCHEOLOGY. 471 

various agencies may have been brought together and 
buried in the same spot; rains and floods may have 
effected this along the valleys ; and the tools and bones 
of man may have been washed into caverns where the 
bones of animals had rested long before him, and been 
whirled into intimate conjunction by the eddies of subter- 
ranean currents. " That such intermixtures have really 
taken place in some caverns," says Lyell, "and that 
geologists have occasionally been deceived, and have 
assigned to one and the same period fossils which had 
really been introduced at successive times, will readily 
be conceded." 

There is sufficient evidence, however, that this has 
not always been the case — there are instances that 
clearly indicate that they were coeval. In the Brix- 
ham cave, the reader will remember, close to a very 
perfect flint tool, there was found the entire hind leg 
of a cave-bear, every bone in its natural place, clearly 
proving that it must have been introduced clothed with 
its muscles. Had the flint tool been subsequently buried 
close to it by the eddies of a subterranean current, these 
bones would have been washed asunder and scattered. 
A hind limb of an extinct rhinoceros was found under 
the same circumstances in gravel containing flint imple- 
ments, at Menchecourt, France. Again, in Kent's Hole, 
the detection of the human jaw at the base of the first 
stalagmite layer, and of the remains of extinct mammals 
at the upper surface ; and also the presence of the bone 
implements with extinct animals clear below this imper- 
vious stalagmite floor, render it impossible to doubt that 



472 ARCHEOLOGY. 

man was the contemporary of the mammoth and his 
compeers. — With these and other evidences, therefore, 
before us, we regard it as an established fact that some 
of the extinct mammalia were coeval with man. 

From this fact, namely, the finding of human bones 
and tools in such connection with the remains of extinct 
animals as to prove them contemporaneous, two argu- 
ments have been derived respecting the antiquity of man ; 
one grounded on the present elevated situation of the 
caves and drifts where these relics have been found, the 
other on the great length of time supposed to have 
elapsed since these animals became extinct. These two 
trains of reasoning, it has been asserted, prove that Man 
has been an inhabitant of the earth for a vastly longer 
period than what the Bible history represents. It is 
important, therefore, that we examine these arguments. 

First, then, that based on the situation of the caves 
and terraces where these commingled remains of man and 
beasts have been discovered : it runs thus — These bones 
and implements were for the most part deposited in 
the caves and terraces by water, that is, by the streams 
now flowing so many scores or hundreds of feet below 
them, but then above, or at their level; these streams 
have since gradually worn and scooped out these valleys 
through the rocky strata- to their present width and 
depth ; but to effect this enormous amount of erosion, 
at the slow rate wo see them working, must have occu- 
pied many tens of thousands of years; therefore, those 
bones and implements of man must be so many tens of 
thousands of years old. — Such is the argument, and such 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 473 

the conclusion to which it seeks to bring us. Let us 
look at it; of what do we find its several links com- 
posed? Simply of so many assumptions, which have 
not been and never can be proved. 

It is a mere assumption that the water that flowed 
through these caverns was supplied by the streams now 
so far below them. There is no evidence that these 
caverns ever were such permanent water-courses; the 
loam and bones and tools they contain might have been 
washed into them at intervals in times of heavy rains 
through fissures from above, of which these limestone 
districts are full ; in many cases they are seen to have 
been in communication with the surface by such aper- 
tures, but which are now choked up; and the rains 
might have flowed in even through their present 
entrances which open on the hill-sides, for the outward 
conformation of the ground might have been very dif- 
ferent once from what they are now,— in the course of 
hundreds or thousands of years masses of rock may have 
fallen and masses of earth may have crumbled down, 
so as to entirely change the configuration of the surface 
about them. 

Sir Charles Lyell, after a careful examination of these 
caves and valleys, came to the conclusion that the 
human relics mixed with those of extinct animals were 
probably not coeval. " The caverns having been at one 
period the dens of wild beasts, and having served at 
other times as places of human habitation, worship, 
sepulture, concealment, or defence, one might easily con- 
ceive that the bones of man and those of animals which 



474 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

were strewed over the floors of subterranean cavities, or 
which had fallen into tortuous rents connecting them 
with the surface, might, when swept away by floods, be 
mingled in one promiscuous heap in the same ossiferous 
mud or breccia." * And Dr. Schmerling, an enthusiastic 
advocate of man's great antiquity, makes the admission, 
" that most of the materials, organic and inorganic, now 
filling the caverns, have been washed into them through 
narrow, vertical, or oblique fissures, the upper extrem- 
ities of which are choked up with soil and graveL" 

Again : It is an assumption only that these valleys 
are the work of the streams that now flow through them. 
These long and broad fractures in the crust of the earth 
might have been mainly formed long ages before by 
subterranean convulsions, and as the country after the 
Glacial period was elevated from the bosom of the ocean, 
they might have come up filled with sand or alluvium, 
which was afterward readily and rapidly carried away 
by these streams, and thus cleared out into open valleys 
much such as we now behold them. 

Once more : It is but an assumption, and a groundless 
one, that the present rate of wear and tear effected by 
these streams always has been their rate of working, and 
therefore offers a basis for estimating the length of time 
it has taken to excavate the valleys to their existing 
dimensions. As a region or country is cleared of the 
primitive forest and brought under cultivation, its rivers 
;uid brooks are invariably reduced in volume; of this 



* Principles <>J Gcoloijy, 9th Ed., p. 740. 



ARCHMOLOGY. 475 

a thousand proofs may be found in the United States. 
The time, therefore, may have been, doubtless has been, 
when the streams under consideration were much larger 
than at present, and subject to more frequent and violent 
floods, and so tore and carried away the earth at a much 
faster rate than they do in our day. — This whole argu- 
ment, therefore, derived from the present elevated situa- 
tions of the caves and terraces where traces of man have 
been found, proves nothing as to the time when they 
were deposited there. For aught that can be shown to 
the contrary, all the fluviatile action that has taken 
place either in the caves or the valleys might have 
been effected within the period of historic time. 

Present rates of change either in the animal or physical 
world may be no examples, no parallels, of rates that 
obtained in ages past. And yet, the imposing calcula- 
tions put forth to prove the extreme antiquity of Man 
deduced from the elevation of Scotland and Scandinavia 
and Sardinia, from the erosion of roeks and the deposit 
of alluvium, from the growth of peat, from the accumula- 
tion of Deltas in lakes and in the sea, and from the range 
and extinction of animal species — are all based upon 
'present rates of change ; based upon the sheer assump- 
tion that the agencies which effect changes in the present 
period never worked at a more rapid or powerful rate 
in any period of the past. No more erroneous or absurd 
would it be to take the action of one particular river as 
the measure of the action of all the rivers of the globe, 
than to take the rate of change in one age, as the rate 
for all ages of time. Every geologist knows that the 



476 ARCHEOLOGY. 

activity of the elements of change was enormously 
developed in past ages, and in a way that mere lapse of 
time will not suffice to explain. Take, for example, the 
action of Frost : the greatest part of New England, and 
the greatest part of Old England, too, are strewed with 
the remains of the Northern Drift — an evidence of ice 
action on a scale immensely greater than any now wit- 
nessed in those parts of the w r orld. How or by what 
means that terrible glacial period was brought on, we 
know not ; but this we do know, that the rate of erosion 
by present glaciers is no test whatever of the changes 
and desolations produced by their vast development in 
times that are past. Take again the action and power 
of water in by-gone ages : Humboldt tells us of traces 
of such action on the banks of the Orinoco 1G0 and 190 
feet above the present level of the river, and adds that 
" these traces prove, what indeed we learn from all the 
river beds of Europe, that those streams which still 
excite our admiration by their magnitude, are but incon- 
siderable remains of the immense masses of water belong- 
ing to a former age." And Sir Charles Lyell, speaking 
of the alterations in the valley of the Muse, says, " It is 
more than probable that the rate of change was once far 
more active than it is now." If ice action and water 
action were so much more powerful, why not also gas 
and steam action, why not subterranean and atmospheric 
action of many kinds? Calculations in regard to the 
antiquity of the human race, therefore, based upon 
present rates of change, are utterly uncertain and worth- 
less; and until those who indulge in them shall have 



ARCHEOLOGY. 477 

demonstrated that frosts and floods were never greater, 
storms never more frequent or violent, subterranean fires 
never more intense, waste and destruction never more 
extensive, elevation and subsidence never more rapid, 
erosion and deposition never more active, than at the 
present time — until this be* demonstrated, we say, which 
it is not likely soon to be, no man on this ground need 
be alarmed for the authority of his Bible, or suffer his 
faith to be shaken in the history it gives of the origin, 
growth, and dispersion of our race. 

Let us now glance at the second argument urged in 
connection with the Cave bones and implements in proof 
of the great antiquity of man, which, briefly expressed, 
runs as follows : Man was the contemporary of many 
species of carnivorous and herbivorous animals now 
unknown in the world ; the discovered fossils of these 
prove that they were introduced upon the earth at a 
very remote period ; after their introduction they went 
on multiplying and flourishing through many long ages, 
then through about a£ many ages gradually declined, 
growing more and more scarce until, finally, they be- 
came extinct; and their extinction even took place 
before the era of the Danish Peat and Swiss Lake- 
dwellings : now as species fade and pass away so slowly 
that the whole of historic time has sufficed to produce 
scarcely a perceptible change in those now living, this 
entire cycle of extinct animal existence must have occu- 
pied many tens of thousands of years ; therefore the 
relics of Man found commingled with their remains 
must be as many, or at least nearly as many tens of 
thousands of years old. 



478 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

Here again we have a chain of mere suppositions. 
The era of the Danish Peat is an imaginary era ; there 
is no fact nor class of facts known by which anything 
like a definite date can be assigned to it. That these 
animals became extinct before that era (whatever it was) 
is nothing more or better than a conjecture. That time 
was the chief element of their destruction, or that they 
dwindled in numbers and became extinct slowly in the 
process of long ages, is likewise a mere assumption; 
changes in the condition of the atmosphere, or in the 
elevation of the land, or in the climate and seasons, 
might have rapidly diminished their numbers, and in a 
comparatively short period wiped them all away. Such 
changes we know have taken place, and have been 
followed by such results. Geology reveals past periods 
of vast destruction of animal life both on land and in 
the sea, the causes of which we cannot even conjecture. 
There is nothing going on at present in the domains of 
the elephant and the reindeer which could accumulate 
the masses of elephant bones and tusks that are found 
in the frozen cliffs of Siberia, or the hundreds of antlers 
of reindeer that were taken out of only one of the Gower 
caves. These relics attest the power of past destroying 
agencies, and the vast aggregate of life extinguished. 
A change in the direction of the Gulf Stream, which is 
supposed to have taken place by the giving way of a 
rocky barrier among the West India Islands, might have 
produced a rapid alteration in the climate of Europe ; 
and we may, with better reason, refer the extinction of 
these great mammalia to such alterations, than to the 



ARCHEOLOGY. 479 

mere lapse of time. We can scarcely estimate the rapid 
destruction which would ensue, if perennial vegetation 
gave place to the leafless trees and barren soil of a 
northern winter. Again : that the era of these extinct 
animals and the era of Man, as the argument intimates, 
were synchronous, is not exactly true ; all that known 
facts prove is, that the close of the former era overlapped 
the beginning of the latter era; that is, some of these 
animals remained and continued their existence for a 
considerable period after Man was brought upon the 
scene. The latter generations of the mammoth, cave- 
bear, etc., were contemporary with the earlier genera- 
tions of the human race; and hence the juxtaposition 
in which some of their remains are found. 

Now, from this what is the legitimate inference ? Not 
that the human race is more ancient, but that these 
extinct mammals were more recent, than we have been 
wont to suppose. We have been accustomed to regard 
these animals as belonging to the immeasurably distant 
cycles of geology, whereas, as these late discoveries show, 
they lived in much later times. It is in this light that 
some of our ablest archaeologists now regard this subject. 
The able and candid Prestwich, of whom Sir Charles 
Lyell avers that the authority of no man living is of 
greater weight in this matter, says, " The evidence from 
the occurrence of human relics with the bones of extinct 
animals, as it at present stands, does not seem to me 
to necessitate the carrying of man back in time past, 
so much as the bringing forward the extinct animals 
toward our own times." 



430 ARC HAL OLOG V. 

Various evidences can be adduced to show that the 
hairy mammoth, the cave-bear, cave-lion, woolly rhino- 
ceros, etc., have not been extinct as long as has com- 
monly been represented. The men of a no very remote 
period have left behind them clear proof that they were 
acquainted with these quadrupeds. In connection with 
their fossil bones there have been found in several caves 
of France graven pictures of several of them, in which 
the forms are so lifelike, and the attitude in very action 
so thoroughly caught, that one is convinced at a glance, 
that their ancient authors must have seen and been 
familiar with them in real life. Of these pictorial 
sketches of ancient artists some fifty specimens were 
exhibited at the International Exposition, in 1867. 
These have been carefully described by M. Gabriel de 
Mortillet. One of them, perhaps the earliest, was found 
in the upper cave at Massat; it is a tolerably correct 
likeness of the great Cave-bear, drawn on a stone. 
Another is an outline sketch of the Mammoth, drawn 
on a slab of ivory, from the cave of La Madeleine ; when 
MM. Lartet and Christy found this, it was broken into 
five pieces, which they managed to put together very 
accurately. The small eye and curved tusks of the 
animal may be perfectly distinguished, as well as its 
huge trunk, and even its abundant mane. A third 
figure is that of an entire Mammoth, graven on a frag- 
ment of reindeer horn, from the rock-shelters of P>ru- 
niquel. This figure forms the hilt of a poniard, the 
blade of which springs from the front part of the animal. 
It is seen at once to be the Mammoth by its trunk, its 




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482 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

wide flat feet, and especially by its erect tail, ending in 
a bunch of hair: — the living species of elephant never 
sets up the tail, and has no bunch of hair at the end 
of it. This whole figure agrees remarkably well with 
the restoration of this animal published by the Eussian 
naturalist Brandt, and leaves no doubt that the cave 
artist was personally acquainted with the beast. A 
fourth representation is that of the Cave-lion on a frag- 
ment of a staff of authority, carved with great clearness ; 
the head, in particular, is perfectly represented. This 
also was found at Bruniquel. Two ivory daggers were 
discovered at the same place; these are very artistically 
executed, and are the most finished specimens that have 
been found up to the present time. Both of them repre- 
sent a reindeer with the head drawn back ; but whilst 
in one dagger the blade springs from the hinder part of 
the body, in the same way as in the rough-hewn horn, 
in the other it proceeds from the front of the body, 
between the head and the fore-legs. The hind-legs are 
stretched out and meet again at the feet, thus forming 
a hole between them, which was probably used as a ring 
on which to suspend the dagger. At Laugerie-Basse 
a slab of slate was found, on which is drawn in outline 
a reindeer fight; it is one of those furious contests in 
which the males engage during the rutting season; and 
the artist has executed his design in a spirited manner. 
Sketches of the ox and the bison have also been met 
with in various styles. " In a cave, in the Department 
oC Ariose, which M. Lartet ascribes to the period of the 
aurochs, a quadruped which survived the reindeer in 



ARCHEOLOGY. 4g3 

the south of France, there are bone instruments of a still 
more advanced state of the arts, as, for example, barbed 
arrows, with a small canal in each, believed to have 
served for the insertion of poison ; also a needle of bird's 
bone, finely shaped, with an eye or perforation at one 
end, and a stag's horn, on which is carved a representa- 
tion of a bear's head, and a hole at one end as if for 
suspending it. In this figure we see, says M. Lartet, 
what may perhaps be the earliest known example of 
lines used to express shading." 

Now, these remarkable sketches and carvings, said to 
have been executed in the so-called Stone Age, prove 
to us plainly two things, — First, that the men of that 
early period were not the rude and ignorant " animals," 
that a certain class of writers are fond of representing 
them, for they evince very decided artistic taste, and 
display admirable skill in the execution of their works : 
and they prove, secondly, that in the time of these 
ancient artists the Mammoth, the Cave-bear, the Cave- 
lion, etc., were living and familiar objects, and therefore 
have not been extinct for the unnumbered ages claimed 
by those who thereby seek to exaggerate the antiquity 
of the human race. 

Another class of evidences which go to show that these 
large mammalians survived till comparatively recent 
times are found in their well-preserved remains in the 
frozen regions of Siberia. Of these we have the following 
interesting examples in Sir Charles Lyell's great work, 
The Principles of Geology. — "In 1772, Pallas obtained 
from Wiljuiskoi, in latitude 64°, from the banks of the 



484 ARCHEOLOGY 

Wiljui, a tributary of the Lena, the carcass of a Rhino- 
ceros, taken from the frozen sand. This carcass, which 
was compared to a natural mummy, emitted an odor like 
putrid flesh, part of the skin being still covered with 
short crisp wool, and with black and gray hairs." Pro- 
fessor Brandt, of St. Petersburg, adds the following par- 
ticulars respecting this wonderful relic: — "I have been 
so fortunate as to extract from cavities in the molar 
teeth of the Wiljui rhinoceros a small quantity of its 
half-chewed food, among which fragments of pine-leaves, 
one-half of the seed of a polygonaceous plant, and very 
minute portions of wood with porous cells, were still 
recognizable. It was also remarkable, on a close inves- 
tigation of the head, that the blood-vessels discovered in 
the interior of the mass appeared filled, even to the 
capillary vessels, with a brown mass (coagulated blood), 
which in many places still showed the red color of the 
blood." 

" Thirty years after the above discovery, the entire 
carcass of a mammoth was found by a Mr. Adams farther 
north. It fell from a mass of ice, in which it had been 
encased^ in latitude 70°; and so perfectly had the soft 
parts of this carcass been preserved, that the flesh, as it 
lay, was devoured by wolves and bears. The skeleton 
is still in the museum of St. Petersburg, the head retain- 
ing its integument and many of the ligaments entire. 
The skin of the animal was covered, first, with black 
bristles, thicker than horse-hair, from twelve to sixteen 
inches in length j secondly, with hair of a reddish brown 
color, about four inches long; and thirdly, with wool 



ARCHEOLOGY. 485 

of the same color as the hair, about an inch in length. 
Of the fur, upwards of thirty pounds' weight were gath- 
ered from the w r et sandbank. The individual was nine 
feet high, and sixteen feet long, without reckoning the 
large curved tusks : a size rarely surpassed by the largest 
living male elephants." 

Similar discoveries were made in 1843 by Middendorf, 
a Russian naturalist, in the same region. "One elephant 
he found on the Tas, near the Arctic Circle, with some 
parts of the flesh in so perfect a state that the ball of 
the eye is now preserved in the museum at Moscow. 
Another carcass, together with a young individual of 
the same species, was met with in the same year, in 
latitude 75°, with the flesh decayed. It was imbedded 
in strata of clay and sand, with erratic blocks, fifteen 
feet above the level of the sea." 

" So fresh is the ivory of these perished animals 
throughout Northern Russia, that according to Tilesius, 
thousands of fossil tusks have been collected, and used 
in turning; yet others are still collected and sold in 
great plenty. He declares his belief that the bones still 
left in that country must greatly exceed in number those 
of all the elephants now living on the globe." 

" Remains of the mammoth have been gathered from 
the cliffs of frozen mud and from the ice on the east side 
of Behring's Straits, in Russian America. As the cliffs 
waste away by the thawing of the ice, tusks and bones 
fall out, and a strong odor of animal matter is exhaled 
from the mud." 

"In 1866, in the flat country near the mouths of the 



486 ARCII/EOLOGY. 

Yenesei, between latitudes 70° and 75° north, many 
skeletons of mammoths were found retaining the skin 
and hair. The heads of most of them are said to have 
been turned toward the south. So late as 18G9-70, an 
exploring expedition was made by Her von Maydell, 
under the direction of the Academy of St. Petersburg, 
to the river Indigiska, to examine some remains said 
to have been discovered there. The travellers found 
the skin and hair as well as the bones of the elephant 
(Elephas primigenius) at two points on the river, about 
thirty miles distant from each other, and sixty miles 
from the Arctic Sea." 

In view of such strange facts, it is natural to ask. 
How subsisted these great animals in these barren and 
severe northern latitudes ? Or whence came they there ? 
To these questions no answer that is entirely satisfactory 
perhaps can be returned at present. According to Mur- 
chison, a constant elevation of this whole arctic region 
has been slowly going on, and as a consequence a con- 
stant extension of the land toward the north; now both 
these, according to well-known principles, have a ten- 
dency to increase the severity of the winters. It is 
probable, therefore, that the climate in former ages may 
not have been as rigorous as it is found at present. "It 
has also been suggested that, as in our own times, the 
northern animals migrate, so the Siberian elephant and 
rhinoceros may have wandered towards the north in 
summer. The musk oxen annually desert their winter 
quarters in the south, and cross the sea upon the ice, 
to graze from May to September, on the rich pasturage 



ARCHEOLOGY. 487 

of Melville Island, in latitude 75°. The mammoth may 
in like manner have made excursions, during the warmth 
of a northern summer, from the central or temperate 
parts of Asia" to the regions where their remains are 
now found. And it might often have happened that 
numbers of these animals, while grazing in narrow 
valleys or at the base of cliffs along the rivers, were 
overtaken by sudden snow storms and buried beneath 
huge drifts-, where their bodies in time would be enclosed 
in solid ice, and then with the swelling floods of return- 
ing summer be floated down as in icebergs towards the 
northern sea. " Or, a herd of mammoths returning from 
their summer pastures in the north, may have been 
surprised, while crossing some broad stream, by the 
sudden congelation of the waters. M. Hue, in his Travels 
through Tibet, in 1846, relates, that, after many of his 
party had been frozen to death, the survivors pitched 
their tents on the banks of Mouroni-Ousson, and saw 
from their encampment some black shapeless objects 
ranged in file across the stream. As they advanced 
nearer, no change either in form or distinctness was 
apparent; nor was it till they were quite close, that 
they recognized in them a troop of the wild oxen, called 
Yak by the Tibetans. There were more than fifty of 
them encrusted in the ice. No doubt they had tried to 
swim across at the moment of congelation, and had been 
unable to disengage themselves. Their beautiful heads, 
surmounted by huge horns, were still above the surface, 
but their bodies were held fast in the ice, which was so 
transparent that the position of the imprudent beasts 



488 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

was easily distinguishable ; they looked as if still swim- 
ming, but the eagles and ravens had pecked out their 
eyes." * 

From the study of a variety of natural facts, geol- 
ogists have been lead to the conclusion, that at the early 
period when the stone implements of England and 
France were in use, these countries were undivided by 
sea, and the climate in them was much colder than at 
present, as cold, in fact, as that which now prevails some 
ten or fifteen degrees farther toward the north, or in the 
latitude of the localities in which some of the Siberian 
carcasses have been discovered. Under these circum- 
stances, therefore, the hair-clad mammoth and rhinoceros 
would find a congenial home at that period in the val- 
leys of the Thames, the Somme and the Seine, where 
their remains and the stone hammers and flint knives 
are now found lying together. 

Let us now return to our argument, viz., that urged in 
proof of the vast antiquity of Man from the length of 
time which must have elapsed since the extinction of the 
mammoth, the rhinoceros, cave-bear, etc., whose bones 
are found in caves and drifts commingled with the tools 
and relics of Man. Let the reader now contemplate the 
pictures and images of these animals left in the cave- 
dwellings of man, — their artistic style, their life-like 
forms, their expressive attitudes, and not omitting even 
their hair-line shadings; lot him consider the freshness 
of the LVOry tusks which abound along the streams of 



*Thc above extracts arc from The Principles of GvoLxj}/, Chap. X. 



ARCHEOLOGY. 489 

Siberia; let him stand over the mammoth and rhinoceros 
carcasses still wrapped in their shaggy hides ; let him 
look at living wolves and foxes greedily devouring them ; 
let him smell their flesh and handle their long and 
woolly hair ; let him place his finger on the eyeball still 
in its socket, and trace the veins still holding in coag- 
ulated form the blood that was wont to course along 
them, and examine the half-chewed pine-leaves still 
remaining in the cavities of their teeth — let the reader 
do all this, we say, not forgetting even that they 
have been frozen, and let him judge for himself if the 
extinction of these great quadrupeds will carry him back 
to any very high antiquity, or if he must travel into the 
past to the distance of from ten to twenty thousand years, 
as is claimed, before he can see them browse and breed 
and roam among the living inhabitants of the earth. 
And yet this is one of the arguments put forth, under 
the name of Science, to overthrow the history and 
chronology of the Bible ! Well might a recent writer in 
the Anthropological Review have said, — " It may almost 
be asserted that every scientific opinion is speculative. 
It may be safely said that there is no opinion current 
among scientific men, — not even of those opinions whose 
claim to the title c principle 9 appears most unquestion- 
able, — that is not essentially provisional, liable to 
modification or even revolution under the pressure of 
increased knowledge." * 

The argument for the great antiquity of man, based 

* No. 24, p. 19. 



490 ARCHAEOLOGY. 

on the coincidence of his relics with those of extinct 
animals amounts to simply nothing — since many species 
of animals whose first introduction dates much further 
hack in geological time are at present contemporaneous 
with man. Add to this, that "it is every whit as 
natural and as logical to infer the relative recency of these 
now extinct animals because the works of man are 
found with them, as it is to infer the antiquity of man 
from the assumed greater age of these animals. Their 
coincidence proves nothing as to remoteness of time in 
man's history." * 

What though man was the contemporary of the mam- 
moth, cave-bear, cave-lion, woolly rhinoceros, etc., so 
were many other of the present living species of animals 
their contemporaries also ; and what though these great 
quadrupeds have become extinct after the advent of 
man, so have several other animals since their time 
become extinct. The history of the globe from the 
dawn of organized existence has been the history of a 
succession of animal creations and extinctions. It is the 
general doom of every species as well as of every indi- 
vidual to die at some time, and dying is not the work of 
thousands, or even of hundreds of years : it is an event 
that takes place in a day. The hairy mammoth and his 
compeers had their dying day prior perhaps to the time 
of written history, and other species we know have been 
brought to their dying day within the period of history. 
The Bear died out in the British Isles in the eleventh 



* Bkndiwj Lhjhts, p. ±20. 



ARCHEOLOGY. 491 

century of the Christian era; the Irish Elk, whose 
antlers stood ten feet and a half above the ground, in 
the beginning of the fourteenth century ; the Reindeer 
of Denmark toward the close of the fifteenth century ; 
the Urus, first mentioned by Julius Caesar, in the six- 
teenth century ; the Moa of New Zealand and the Epi- 
ornis of Madagascar within the epoch of the traditions 
of those Islands; the Dodo and some other birds of 
Mauritius in the seventeenth century ; the Solitaire of 
the island of Rodrigues disappeared somewhat later ; and 
the ltist seen of the great Auk of the Arctic Regions was 
in 1844. Other species still are fast approaching the 
day of their extinction. " The Kangaroo and the Emu," 
says Lyell, " are retreating rapidly before the progress of 
colonization in Australia, and it scarcely admits of a 
doubt that the general cultivation of that country must 
lead to the extirpation of both." The Beaver and Moose 
and Buffalo of North America are being crowded in a 
similar manner from their ancient ranges, and appear to 
be inevitably doomed to the same fate at no distant 
period. Of the Aurochs, that once ranged over a large 
portion of Europe, but few remain, and even this rem- 
nant survives simply because protected by the Russian 
Czars in the forest of Lithuania. — With facts such as 
these before us, we see that the extinction of the mam- 
moth and cave-animals is but one of many similar events 
that have taken place within the human period, and that 
it does not necessarily imply the very high antiquity 
which some have claimed for it, in their eager desire to 
carry back the origin of our race to a dateless past. 



492 ARCHEOLOGY. 

Many of the discoveries of archaeology have been 
unlooked for, and, indeed, quite surprising, but none of 
them can be shown to be irreconcilable with the testi- 
mony of Scripture. Nothing that has been observed in 
the Peat-beds or Shell-mounds of Denmark ; no relic 
dredged from the Lake -dwellings of Switzerland or 
exhumed from the alluvium of the Mississippi or the 
Nile ; no fossil or implement brought to light from the 
caves of Belgium or Britain, from the basin of London, 
or the gravel-pits of Amiens, or the sepulchres of Aurig- 
nac — furnish anything worthy of the name of proof, 
that we are one step further removed in time from the 
infancy of our race than the Sacred History indicates. 
The chronology of the Bible spans an epoch that is 
abundantly broad to comprehend all vestiges yet dis- 
covered that either belong or refer to Man as a tenant 
of the earth. This is the testimony of the most cautious 
and trustworthy geologists. " I find no traces of Man," 
says Dr. F. Pfaff, " with any certainty, further back than 
the great climatic changes of the Quaternary Period, the 
most reliable of which do not reach back more than 
5000 to 7000 years from the present time," — dates both 
of which are amply covered by the chronology of the 
Greek Scriptures, which places the Deluge 5120 years, 
and the creation of Man 7382 years from the present 
writing. 

As with many discoveries in other fields of natural 
science, so with some of the developments of archaeology, 
an attempt has been made to undermine the faith of 
men in the Sacred Record. A few disconnected and 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 493 

imperfectly understood facts have been hastily construed 
and arrogantly held up by sceptics as evidences against 
the truth of the Bible history; and with haste as 
unscientific as undevout these have rushed exultant to 
the conclusion that the fate of Christianity is decided ! 
But as has happened to others, so it happens to these 
now — they meet with their just rebuke in the more 
comprehensive and correct views reached by patient and 
prolonged investigation. " Now," says Professor Christ- 
lieb of Bonn University, "sober investigations are, on 
the ground of careful observation, beating a retreat, and 
instead of the favorite million of years formerly held up 
to the astonished public, are computing much more 
moderate periods. The age of the mammoth, the cave- 
bear and the reindeer, which scientists, especially 
Frenchmen, have been trying to separate by thousands 
of years, are now by thorough investigators, like Fraas, 
placed quite close together. And the lake dwellings too ; 
how has their origin been relegated to immemorable 
antiquity in order to throw discredit on the Biblical 
account of man. And now scientists are beginning to 
abandon the idea of the stone, bronze, and iron ages being 
successive epochs ; so that we may confidently assert that 
some of these remains extend back no more than a few 
centuries beyond Caesar, and hence are not even older 
than historical times. And so, after all, the 6000 years 
of the Bible are not so utterly insufficient to accommo- 
date all the remains of ancient civilization. But in what 
hot haste were scientists, at the time, to spread these 



494 ARCHEOLOGY. 

now exploded notions in all kinds of nonular publica- 
tions." * 

Let the Christian not miss the lesson which experi- 
ence thus proffers him ; — that if some unexpected 
development, or startling discovery, or crude hypothesis 
of science, seem for the moment to oppose the plain 
statements of Scripture, he can afford to wait patiently 
for the clearer light that is sure to come, in the calm 
assurance that the foundation of God — the Word which 
he hath given to men — standeth sure ; and, that while 
he may be pained to witness a man of unsanctified talent 
here or there disposed in the very presence-chamber of 
the Most High to turn his back upon the throne, let him 
remember that " the older and honored chiefs in natural 
science," now, as ever, avow that in pursuing their 
studies of Nature, whether among the vestiges of the 
past or the operations of the present, they still feel them- 
selves treading 

"Upon the great world's altar stairs, 
That slope through darkness up to God." 



* Paper read before the Evangelical Alliance, at Xew York, in 1873. 



Natural History 



AND 



The Deluge of Noah 



These ancient traditions of the Flood, which we find dispersed over the whole 
stirface of the globe, like the relics of a vast shipwreck, are highly interesting 
in the philosophical study of our own species. — Humboldt. 

495 



The character of the Ante-diluvians : i. Moral aspect of the 
Deluge; 2. Physical nature of the Deluge; 3. Extent of the 
Deluge; 4. How the Deluge was produced; 5. Where the Ark 
rested. 

496 



Natural History 

AND 

The Deluge of Noah. 



HE first Man, Adam, as he came out of his 
Maker's hands, was an innocent, holy, and 
happy being ; was, after his kind, a perfect 
creature physically, mentally, and morally. 
Sense, intellect, affections and conscience 
were in perfect harmony with one another, 
and with the Divine Will. His was a per- 
fectly sound mind in a perfectly sound body. In all the 
varied exercises of his faculties, in all the emotions of his 
heart, in all his converse and activity, there was a com- 
plete and faultless conformity to the mind and law of 
God. And his love to that blessed and glorious Being, 
while it was the governing principle of his whole con- 
duct, was also to him a perennial source of the most 
pure and sublime happiness. In the image of God, and 
in his own likeness, was man created. 

The primogenitor of the human race, however, did 
not long continue in this happy and honorable state. 

32 497 




498 NATURAL HISTORY. 

Though placed in "a garden of delights," surrounded 
with everything that was delicious to the taste, and 
pleasant to the eye, yet, in an evil hour, he yielded to 
temptation, and put forth his hand to pluck and eat the 
fruit of the forbidden tree. And dismal and disastrous, 
indeed, were the immediate consequences of this trans- 
gression. His whole relation and intercourse with his 
Creator were instantly changed. He was bereaved of 
the sweet presence and favor of God — dreadful light 
broke in upon his soul, revealing his guilt and misery — 
the Divine voice, before transporting music, became a 
terror — a sense of alienation, distrust, and fear invaded 
his whole being — and a dreadful proneness to evil carried 
him continually contrary to the dictates of both reason 
and conscience. He had become a fallen and sinful 
creature. 

The direful effects of that one transgression did not 
terminate with Adam himself; he begat his children in 
his own likeness — in his own fallen, sinful, and mortal 
likeness. And thus by the fall of one all became sinners. 
The contagion of sin affected all his posterity. Iniquity 
and crime spread and multiplied among them as they 
spread and multiplied. Nay, the stream of corruption 
flowed on with increased speed and violence as increased 
the human family on the earth. Though the descrip- 
tions given us of the earlier generations of our race are 
brief and general, yet they present to us a most dreadful 
and revolting picture of the state of depravity and wick- 
edness to which they came at a comparatively early date 
in their History. This is the Divine record : — 



NATURAL HISTORY. 499 

And God looked upon the earth, and behold it was cor- 
rupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth : 
God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, 
and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was 
only evil continually : The earth was corrupt before God, 
and the earth was filled with violence ; and it repented the 
Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved 
Him at his heart. 

A more comprehensive summary of the greatness, and 
extent of human wickedness it is scarcely possible to 
conceive than this. The mind is left where it must 
fill up the outline of this horrid picture with everything 
that is degrading to the human character ; with every- 
thing that is profligate and abominable in manners; 
with everything that is base, false, deceitful, licentious, 
and profane ; and with everything that is horrible and 
destructive in war, and ruinous to the interests and 
happiness of the human family. Let us glance at the 
several particulars included in this record. 

The language employed is most intensive in its char- 
acter. 1. God saio, — observed a condition of things 
among men demanding his special attention. 2. All 
flesh; — impiety and wickedness had become universal ; 
it was not merely the majority of mankind that had 
become corrupt, and given unbounded scope to their 
passions and licentious desires, while smaller societies 
were still found fearing God and keeping his com- 
mandments, but all, all flesh had corrupted their ways. 
3. Every imagination of the thoughts of mans heart was 
only evil continually ; — every invention, and every pur- 



500 NATURAL HISTORY. 

pose and scheme devised both by individuals and com- 
munities, were of a malevolent nature ; the spectacles 
of misery and horror which the universal prevalence of 
such principles and practices produced must have been 
beyond the power of imagination to describe or conceive. 
4. The earth teas filled icith violence; — violence was the 
order of the day ; there was no safety for life or property, 
for reputation, rights, or chastity. From this declara- 
tion we are necessarily led to conceive a scene in which 
universal anarchy and disorder, devastation and wretch- 
edness, everywhere prevailed; the strong and powerful 
forcibly seizing upon the wealth and possessions of the 
weak, violating the persons of the female sex, oppressing 
the poor, the widow and the fatherless, overturning the 
established order of families and societies, plundering 
cities, demolishing habitations, desolating fields and vine- 
yards, and carrying bloodshed and devastation through 
every land ; exhibiting everywhere a scene in which 
cruelty, injustice, and outrages of every kind, revelry, 
riot and debauchery of every description, triumphed 
over every principle of decency and virtue. 5. And it 
repented the Lord that he had made man upon the earth, 
and it grieved him at his heart, — a figurative, but a most 
affecting expression, of God's disapprobation and abhor- 
rence of human conduct ; words that set forth, with 
an energy and imprcssiveness which probably nothing 
purely literal could have conveyed, the exceeding sinful- 
ness and provoking nature of man's character. The race 
had reached a pitch of iniquity that rendered correction 
or reformation alike utterly hopeless. The infection of 
sin was passed all reined v. 



NATURAL HISTORY, 501 

Such was the condition of the world towards the 
middle of the age of Noah, and such was the character 
of human society that drew from the lips of the Al- 
mighty this awful threatening against the whole earth : 
"And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have 
created from the face of the earth ; both man, and beast, 
and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air ; for it 
repenteth me that I have made them. Behold I, even I, 
do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy 
all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under 
heaven ; and everything that is in the earth shall die. 
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord." To 
this threatening God proved fearfully true, and executed 
it with unmitigated severity upon the whole human 
family, and upon everything that breathed upon the 
earth, save Noah and his household, together with the 
animals he was directed to take with him into the ark 
to preserve them alive, in order to restock the world. 
" In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second 
month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day 
were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and 
the windows of heaven were opened. And the waters 
prevailed exceedingly upon the earth ; and all the high 
hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. 
Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail ; and the 
mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved 
upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, 
and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the 
earth, and every man : all in whose nostrils was the 
breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. 



502 NATURAL HISTORY. 

Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him 
in the ark." 

Such is the Scripture account of the most terrible 
catastrophe that has befallen our world since it has been 
inhabited by man — an event so appalling that it so 
strongly impressed itself on the mind of the race that it 
has never been forgotten, but has lived and floated down 
through the ages, in one form or another, in the tradi- 
tions of all the branches of the human family. The 
mythologies and histories of all the ancient nations are 
full of the remembrances of it. It is described in the 
stories of the Greeks and sung in the verses of the Latins. 
Its memory is enshrined in the sacred books of the 
Parsee, the Brahmin, and the Mahomedan, and has been 
assigned a place in the Legend of the Scandinavian and 
in the mythic records of the Chinaman. Its symbols 
are found stamped on the coins of ancient Greece, may 
be traced amid the hoary hieroglyphics of Egypt, recog- 
nized in the sculptured caves of Ilindoostan, and detected 
even in the pictured writings of Mexico. In Cuba and 
Tahiti, on the banks of the Orinoco, on the pampas of 
Brazil, in the mountains of Peru, and in the Islands of 
the Pacific, the traveller has met with traces or tradi- 
tions of the Flood, the Ark, and the rescue of the 
Favored Few. " The tradition of the Flood," says Hugh 
Miller, " may be properly regarded us universal, seeing 
there is scarcely any considerable race of man among 
which, in some of its forms, it is not to be found." And 
Humboldt speaking of this fact says, — "These ancient 
traditions of the human race, which we find dispersed 



NATURAL HISTORY. 503 

over the whole surface of the globe, like the relics of a 
vast shipwreck, are highly interesting in the philosoph- 
ical study of our own species. How many different 
tongues, belonging to branches that appear totally dis- 
tinct, transmit to us the same facts. The traditions 
concerning races that have been destroyed, and the 
renewal of nature, scarcely vary in reality, though every 
nation gives them a local coloring. In the great conti- 
nents, as in the smallest islands of the Pacific Ocean, it 
is always on the loftiest and nearest mountain that the 
remains of the human race have been saved ; and this 
event appears the more recent in proportion as the 
nations are uncultivated, and as the knowledge they 
have of their own existence has no very remote date." 
So long as the descendants of Noah remained together in 
one region, the story of the Deluge would be one and the 
same among all. But as they multiplied and became 
dispersed the account which the different tribes carried 
with them would unavoidably grow more or less 
blurred, and in time more or less distorted, as affected 
by the events of their own history, and by the features 
of their respective localities, till, though retaining the 
main facts, it assumed the varied forms and colorings in 
which we now find it among the different nations of the 
globe. In these wide-spread but wonderfully concur- 
rent traditions, therefore, we have a remarkable corrobo- 
ration of the sacred history ; for on no other ground can 
we rationally or credibly account for them, than that 
they have had their origin in one and the same event — 
the Deluge of the Bible. 



504 NATURAL HISTORY. 

1. Moral aspect of the Deluge. — The Scripture history 
represents the Deluge as a judgment inflicted by God ; — 
" Behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the 
earth." In this particular, also, the Bible is singularly 
corroborated by the ancient traditions. The historic 
and traditionary proof of the Noahian Deluge is so clear 
and conclusive, that tho very enemies of Scripture have 
been obliged to acknowledge its force. M. Bone, for 
example, an eminent writer and scoffer of the French 
school, has said, " I shall be vexed to be thought stupid 
enough to deny that an inundation or catastrophe has 
taken place in the world, or rather in the region inhab- 
ited by the antediluvians. To me this seems to be as 
really a fact in history as the reign of Caesar at Rome." 
But there are those who cannot receive this statement, 
and who choose rather to reject the whole Bible account 
than to believe that the all-wise and righteous Creator 
could have thus by one fearful swoop destroyed a whole 
world's population. They maintain that whatever of 
Flood might have taken place, it was the result of mere 
natural causes, the hand of God was not in it. and the 
Great Father of all is not to be charged with the cruelty 
of thus destroying an entire race of beings. It is to be 
admitted, indeed, that the mind cannot but recoil with 
horror from the idea of such an immense mass of life and 
intelligence being thus in a moment swept into eternity! 
But human feelings and human reason are not competent 
to pronounce judgment on the wisdom or rectitude of a 
dispensation such as this. We are incapable of rightly 
estimating either its antecedents or its consequents. 



NATURAL HISTORY. 505 

God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, neither are his 
ways as our ways. The Father and Ruler of all must 
ever have contemplated the welfare, not of one genera- 
tion only — not of that one generation alone on which a 
fate so awful descended — but of all the countless genera- 
tions of men to the end of time. His wisdom and 
rectitude and love consulted, indeed, the interests of each 
individual, but of each individual in his connection with 
the great whole. Without departing from justice and 
without failing in kindness, even to one, God must ever 
have consulted the greatest good of the whole race. 
Mere forbearance, mere love to one man, himself only 
considered, might have proved the deepest injury to 
multitudes; mere forbearance, mere love to a single 
generation, itself only considered, might have proved 
the deepest injury to countless generations to come. 
We have seen that in the times immediately preceding 
the Deluge, the condition of the world was one of 
deep and widespread degeneracy. In spite of all the 
Divine warnings and Divine forbearance continued 
through a period of more than two thousand years, man- 
kind waxed worse and worse, until they finally reached 
a pitch of corruption and iniquity past all hope of 
reformation. And if men, descending from a pure origin 
such as Adam was by creation, had thus degenerated, 
and sin had spread its ravages so wide and so far and so 
deep — the result must have been terrible beyond concep- 
tion, if the race, as it then had become, had been suffered 
to perpetuate and propagate itself. It was, therefore, an 
act of mercy no less than of justice to arrest the onflow 



506 NATURAL HISTORY. 

of the pestilential deluge of corruption by a deluge of 
waters. Suddenly, awfully, the fountain was stopped 
from which the polluted stream of human life issued ; 
and from a new source, and that comparatively pure, the 
future generations of men were appointed to spring forth. 
Dark and terrible as was the diluvial storm that swept 
over the face of our world, as we look back and thought- 
fully gaze upon it, we behold shooting through it, ever 
and again, gleams of light and mercy, that constrain us 
to believe that all was appointed and controlled by all- 
comprehending wisdom, and by benevolence which can- 
not change nor be defeated of its end. The deluge was 
indeed emphatically an act of judgment — yet not of this 
alone, but of mercy also. In its first and prominent 
aspect, it was an appalling judgment; in its second and 
consequent bearing, it was designed to benefit the world's 
population to the end of time. This act of Divine 
judgment, like a massive and lofty column, which all 
mankind thereafter might see, rises up at the commence- 
ment of the second epoch of human history; and upon it 
is written the warning, in letters which all the world 
may read, — The Lord reignetii, let all the people 

TREMBLE ; LET THE WHOLE EARTH STAND IN AWE OF HlM. 

2. Physical character of the Deluge. — There are those 
who withhold faith in the Bible history of the Deluge on 
the ground that no visible trace or evidence of such a 
catastrophe has been discovered on the /ace of the earth, 
— the fossil shells, animals and vegetables and even the 
superficial drifts and deposits, that were once regarded 
as such evidence, being now proved to be vastly older 



NATURAL HISTORY, 507 

than the age of Noah. On this point geologists, we 
believe, are now agreed ; still, traces of the Flood may 
remain, though none as yet have been detected, and 
they may not even be distinguishable. "The simple 
narrative of Moses," says Dr. Fleming, "permits me to 
believe that the waters rose upon the earth by degrees and 
returned by degrees; that the Flood exhibited no violent 
impetuosity, neither displacing the soil, nor the vegetable 
tribes which it supported, nor rendering the ground unfit 
for the cultivation of the vine. With this conviction in 
my mind, I am not prepared to witness in nature any 
remaining marks of the catastrophe; and I feel my 
respect for the authority of Revelation heightened when 
I see on the present surface no memorials of the event." * 
In this view both Sir Charles Lyell and Dr. Macculloch 
substantially concur. And Dr. Buckland, speaking on 
this subject, says, " It has been justly argued, that as 
the rise and fall of the waters of the Mosaic Deluge are 
described to have been gradual and of short duration, 
they would have produced comparatively little change on 
the surface of the country they overflowed." \ Allowing 
that these great geologists have even carried their idea 
of the Flood's tranquillity & trifle too far, and "admitting 
that the scriptural account would lead us to infer that 
not a little of violence and tumultuous action attended 
that event, it does not follow that its effects could be 
distinguished thousands of years afterwards. Currents 
of water could have affected only the surface of the 

* See Edinburgh Phil. Journal, Vol. 14, pp. 214, 215. 
t Bridgewater Treatise, p. 19. 



508 NATURAL HISTORY. 

globe, and their effects would be similar to those now 
produced by rivers and floods. Yet as they would be 
spread over the whole surface and not so much confined 
as rivers to a particular channel, they would be less 
striking, and sooner obliterated. They would consist 
principally in the removal of the softer parts of the sur- 
face, and the abrasion of the harder parts. But similar 
processes have been going on ever since the Deluge, 
almost everywhere ; and whether after the lapse of 
centuries we should be able to distinguish diluvial from 
alluvial action, it is impossible to say. Perhaps the 
traces of Noah's Flood might be all obliterated. If 
they are all gone, then the fact argues nothing against 
the scriptural account."* To the same effect is the 
testimony of the able Dr. King of Glasgow : " Though 
masses of detritus were accumulated in particular local- 
ities, and the distribution of hills and valleys were 
somewhat changed, who, after the lapse of very many 
centuries, could certainly discriminate these effects from 
those of preceding or subsequent agencies ? If a river 
overflow its banks, or a lake burst its barriers, we see 
sad ravages committed over the adjacent region. But 
next year they are less visible. In a few years the 
action of the elements lias further modified their obvious- 
ness; and when centuries shall have elapsed, how shall 
they be certainly recognized ? "f Although no traces of 
the diluvial waters, therefor©, should remain in any cer- 
tain or discernible (onus, the fact, by the showing of our 

* Professor Hitchcock, Bible Bcpos., Vol. 10, p. 3;>4. 
t PriwiipUs of Geology Explained, p. 07. 



NATURAL HISTORY. 509 

ablest geologists, would prove nothing against the Bible 
record. 

On the other hand, the developments of geology do 
demonstrate that the occurrence of a deluge is quite 
possible and entirely credible. Infidels were wont to 
argue that all the waters of the earth were altogether 
insufficient to overflow the land — and, in fact, that ocean 
must be heaped upon ocean to do so. But this bold and 
seemingly decisive objection against the Mosaic Deluge, 
like many others, has vanished before the progress of 
science. It is now proved, and conceded by every intel- 
ligent man, that any region, however elevated above the 
level of the sea, may, by subsidence of that region, be 
laid beneath its waters ; and that as a matter of fact, 
every portion of the earth's surface has once and again 
been the bed of the ocean. In the cretaceous or chalk 
period, Europe was but an archipelago, by far the larger 
proportion of its present area being submerged, as was 
also that of Asia, while the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the 
Himalayas did but just lift their tops above the general 
level of the waters. And since that period, the British 
Islands have been upheaved and submerged again and 
again ; of the latter of these changes Professor Huxley 
gives the following graphic description — he is speaking 
of the geological formations exhibited on the eastern 
coast of England : 

"At one of the most charming spots on the coast of 
Norfolk, Cromer, you will see the boulder clay forming a 
vast mass, which lies upon the chalk, and must con- 
sequently have come into existence after it. Interposed 



510 NATURAL HISTORY. 

between the chalk and the drift is a comparatively 
insignificant layer, containing vegetable matter. But 
that layer tells a wonderful history. It is full of stumps 
of trees standing as they grew. Fir trees are there with 
their cones, and hazel bushes with their nuts; there 
stand the stools of oak and yew trees, beeches and 
alders. Hence this stratum is appropriately called the 
6 forest bed/ It is obvious that the chalk must have 
been upheaved and converted into dry land, before the 
timber trees could grow upon it. As the 1 bolls of some of 
these trees are from two to three feet in diameter, it is 
no less clear that the dry land thus formed remained in 
the same condition for long ages. And not only do the 
remains of stately oaks and well-grown firs testify to the 
duration of this condition of things, but additional evi- 
dence to the same effect is afforded by the abundant 
remains of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, and 
other great wild beasts. When you look at a collection 
of such remains, and bethink you that these elephantine 
bones did veritably carry their owners about, and these 
great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the 
' forest-bed' is now the only trace, it is impossible not to 
feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of time 
as the annual rings of the tree-stumps. 

" Thus there is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at 
Cromer, and whoso runs may read it. It tells us, with 
an authority that cannot be impeached, that the ancient 
searbed of the chalk sea was raised up, and remained dry 
land, until it was covered with forest, stocked with the 
great game whose spoils have rejoiced your geologists. 



NATURAL HISTORY. 51 \ 

flow long it remained in that condition cannot be said ; 
but 'the whirligig of time brought its revenges' in those 
days as in these. The dry land, with the bones and 
teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away 
among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient 
trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which 
covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. 
Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the 
extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered 
among the topmost twigs of the fir trees. How long this 
state of things endured we know not, but at length it 
came to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hardened 
into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once 
more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the reindeer and 
the elephant ; and at length what we call the history of 
England dawned." * 

Even within the periods of history vast submergences 
and deluges have taken place in different parts of the 
world. As late as 1819, there was a sudden subsidence 
of the ground about the delta of the Indus, and the sea 
flowed in by the eastern mouth of that river, as if " the 
fountains of the great deep had been opened," and in a 
few hours converted a tract of country 2000 square 
miles in area, into an inland sea, on the bosom of which 
the only visible object that remained was the top of the 
tower of the Fort of Sindree, which had been over- 
whelmed. 

In short, geology has shown that deluges are a part of 



* Lay Sermons, No. IX. 



512 NATURAL HISTORY. 

the course of nature. And this being admitted, for no 
one now denies it, all that the record of Moses requires 
us to believe is, that God, in the particular instance of 
Noah's Flood, employed in a very signal manner his 
natural and usual administration to accomplish a moral 
end, namely, to arrest the wickedness of mankind, and 
to give the Race a second trial. 

3. Extent of the Deluge. — The Scripture history has 
been commonly understood to teach that the deluge was 
universal, that is, that its waters covered the entire sur- 
face of the earth, and that of all its air-breathing animals 
those only survived that were preserved in the ark. To 
this view, or interpretation of the inspired record, the 
recent investigations of science present several diffi- 
culties, and difficulties so grave that not a few, equally 
distinguished for their scientific knowledge and their 
devotion to the Bible, now hold that, while the deluge 
was universal as to mankind, it could not have been 
literally universal as to the globe of the earth ; in other 
words, they hold that the deluge overwhelmed the whole 
region inhabited by men, and carried them all away, 
save Noah and his family, but that other and extended 
regions remained unvisited by this great catastrophe, 
and whatever of animal populations they might have 
had were left unharmed by it. Let us, then, look at 
the difficulties that are regarded as being opposed to 
the commonly received opinion of the universal sub- 
mergence of the globe, and the universal destruction 
of its breathing animals, save those preserved in 
the ark. 



NATURAL HISTORY. 5 13 

The first difficulty is founded on the size of the ark. 
It is held to be demonstrable that that vessel was not of 
sufficient capacity to accommodate a male and a female 
of each of all the various species now found living on the 
earth, with the additional " clean animals," together with 
food sufficient for all for a period of twelve months and a 
half. This conducts us to the consideration of two 
things, the dimensions of the ark, and the number of 
animal species. 

The ark, we are told, was 300 cubits in length, 50 
cubits in breadth, and 30 cubits in height. Taking the 
length of the cubit, as determined by Mr. Greaves from 
the measurements of the pyramids of Egypt, to be 21-\£iv 
inches, then the ark must have been (omitting fractions) 
547 feet long, 91 feet wide, and 54 feet deep. This is 
very considerably larger than the largest man-of-war of 
the present day. The Great Eastern, however, is both 
longer and deeper, while it is but a little narrower, being 
680 feet long (691 on deck), 83 feet in breadth, 58 feet 
in depth. In form, the ark appears to have been an 
oblong box, and was not, in the proper sense of the word, 
a ship, as it does not seem to have had either mast, or 
sail, or rudder, being designed simply to float upon the 
water. 

Let us now glance at the number of species of air- 
breathing animals known to exist at the present time, 
all of which must have been in the ark, if the globe was 
totally submerged. These according to the most recent 
enumeration to which the writer has access stand as 
follows : 

33 



514 



NATURAL HISTORY. 



Quadrumana (four-handed animals).... 170 

Marsupialia (pouched animals) 123 

Edentata (toothless animals) 28 

Pachydermata (thick-skinned animals) 39 

Terrestrial carnivora (flesh-eating animals) 514 

Kodentia (gnawing animals) 604 

Ruminantia (cud-chewing animals) 180 

Birds ~ 6266 

Reptiles 642 

8566 



As the animals which entered the ark went in by 
pairs, the male and his female, this number is, of course, 
to be doubled, which gives us 17,132 individuals. 

This product again is to be augmented by the addi- 
tional number of clean animals that were taken in. 
These we read went into the ark "by sevens;" that is, 
as some understand, by seven pairs ; or as others inter- 
pret the words, by seven individuals ; let us admit that 
it was this latter and lesser number, which would give 
us live extra individuals for every clean species. Now 
what the exact number of clean species might have been, 
we are not able to state positively ; but we know that, 
according to the Mosaic test, all sheep, oxen, goats, deer, 
and antelopes were clean, and of these altogether there 
are known not less than 1GG species; which, multiplied 
by. five, give us 830 individuals, to be added to the 
above number, which make an aggregate of 17,962 
breathing animals. 

To all these must further he added at least 550,000 
species, or more than a million individuals of insects of 
all sorts, which, (hough hut diminutive beings, yet being 



NATURAL HISTORY. 515 

so numerous, would require considerable space for their 
suitable accommodation. 

With all the above we must take into our calculation 
the room necessary to stow away in an accessible manner 
the diverse kinds of food and in sufficient amounts, for 
a whole year, and water for all. It would be perhaps a 
low estimate that, taken together, each animal would 
in this length of time consume four times its own bulk ; 
ruminants doubtless would require much more, though 
compressed into the least possible space. 

Now it is asked, if it be credible that an ark of the 
above dimensions was adequate to accommodate this im- 
mense number of animals, together with the amount of 
food necessary for their sustenance ? and, if all these and 
the food they required had been crowded into one vessel, 
was it possible for eight individuals (supposing Noah's 
whole family to be engaged) to daily feed and water 
and take the necessary care of such a vast multitude of 
living creatures ? 

But the inadequate size of the ark is but one of the 
many difficulties believed to stand opposed to the hypo- 
thesis of a universal deluge. It is further urged against 
this supposition that, though the ark had been suffi- 
ciently capacious to receive all these animals with their 
food, they could not by their natural constitutions have 
lived there for a whole year, in one and the same 
temperature. It is said that if tropical animals, or 
animals from the polar regions, were to be removed 
to either of the temperate zones, neither of them could 
survive for any length of time, much less in the crowded 



516 NATURAL HISTORY. 

ark. "All land animals," says Dr. Pye Smith, " having 
their geographical regions, to which their constitutional 
natures are congenial, — many of them being unable to 
live in any other situation, — we cannot represent to 
ourselves the idea of their being brought into one small 
spot from the polar regions, the torrid zone, and all the 
other climates of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, 
Australia, and the thousands of islands, — their preserva- 
tion and provision, and the final disposal of them, — 
without bringing up the idea of miracles more stupendous 
than any that are recorded in Scripture." 

It is argued against the universality of the deluge 
that, as the water in that case would have been mainly 
that of the briny ocean, all living things inhabiting fresh 
water would have been destroyed. Salt water would 
have speedily proved fatal to them. " The fresh-water 
fishes, molluscs, Crustacea and zoophites," says Hugh 
Miller, " could be kept alive in a universal deluge only 
by miraculous means." 

A similar objection to the complete submergence of 
the whole globe is derived from the vegetable creation. 
"Of the one hundred thousand species of known plants, 
few indeed," says the writer last quoted, "would survive 
submersion for a twelvemonth ; nor would the seeds of 
most of the others fare better than the plants themselves. 
There are certain hardy seeds that in favorable circum- 
stances maintain their vitality for ages; but such is not 
the general character of seeds. It is not too much to 
hold that, without special miracle, at least three-fourths 
of the terrestrial vegetation of the globe would have 



NATURAL HISTORY. 517 

perished in a universal deluge that covered over the dry 
land for a year. Assuredly the various vegetable centres 
or regions — estimated by Schouw at twenty-five — bear 
witness to no such catastrophe. Still distinct and un- 
broken, as of old, either no effacing flood has passed over 
them, or they were shielded from its effects at an ex- 
pense of miracle many times more considerable than that 
at which the J ews were brought out of Egypt and pre- 
served amid the nations, or Christianity itself was ulti- 
mately established." 

Again, it is argued against a universal deluge, that 
there are certain classes of animals whose habitations 
have been confined, through all the ages of their ex- 
istence, to certain fixed parts of the globe, from whence 
they could not have been brought to the ark, nor again 
restored from the ark to those parts, where they are 
still found, unless they had been transported to and fro 
by a miracle. For example, South America has a class 
of quadrupeds peculiar to itself — the puma, the jaguar, 
the tapir, the cabiai, the llama, the vicuna, the sloths, 
the armadillos, the opossums, and the whole tribe of 
sapajous; — none of these are to be found in Europe, 
Asia, or Africa; nor is there any evidence that they 
ever did live on either of these continents; South 
America is and always has been their exclusive home ; 
there their respective predecessors existed at the time of 
the deluge, and, as their fossils are believed to prove, long, 
long ages before that event. The same thing is true of 
Australia ; this vast island also has its own peculiar class 
of animals, and very peculiar they are; — the various 



518 NATURAL HISTORY. 

species of kangaroo, phascalomys, dasyurus, and pera- 
mcles, the flying phalangers, the ornithorynchi, and 
ecludna?, are animals which, when first discovered, aston- 
ished naturalists by the strangeness of their conforma- 
tions and proportions, and utterly perplexed them for a 
time as to where in the vast system of animated beings 
they belonged; — this island is the exclusive abode of 
these animals, and, as is believed, has been from the 
day of their creation. New Zealand, likewise, when 
discovered, was found to possess fauna peculiar to itself ; 
— its remarkable species of rats and lizards, and its 
various birds that are so ill provided with wings that 
they can only run along the ground; — and here their 
ancestries of the same peculiar generic characters lived 
and died, whose relics have remained locked up in the 
soils and caves through ages that cannot now be num- 
bered. Now, it is asked, how is it possible to reconcile 
such facts with the supposition of a universal deluge ? 
If these were all in the ark, as they must have been if 
the whole earth was submerged, they could have been 
brought thither, and could have been returned to their 
native homes, where now found, only " at an enormous 
expense of miracles." To say nothing as to the way in 
which they were gathered into the ark, when the deluge 
had passed away, the sloths and armadillos, little fitted 
by nature for long journeys, much less for long voyages, 
Would have to be conveyed across the Atlantic to their 
homes in the southern regions of America ; the kangaroo 
and wombat to their forests and prairies in the insulated 
continent of Australia; and the New Zealand heavy- 



NATURAL HISTORY. 519 

flying quail and wingless wood-hen to those remote 
islands of the Pacific. In no way, that we can see, 
could this have been accomplished save by miracle. 

Once more, a serious difficulty to the universal preva- 
lence of the waters of the deluge is supposed to exist in 
connection with the Insect population of the globe. This 
will be best stated in the words of the great Scotch 
geologist : " How extraordinary an amount of miracle 
would it not require to bring them all together into any 
one centre, or to preserve them there ! Many of them, 
like the myriapoda and the thysanura, have no wings, 
and but feeble locomotive powers ; many of them, such 
as the ephemera and the male ants, live after they have 
got their wings only a few hours, or at most a few days ; 
and there are myriads of them that can live upon but 
single plants that grow in very limited botanic centres. 
Even supposing them all brought into the ark by miracle 
as eggs, what multitudes of them would not, without the 
exertion of a further miracle, require to be sent back to 
their proper habitats as wingless grubs, or as insects 
restricted by nature to a few days of life ! Or, supposing 
the eggs all left in their several localities to lie under 
the water for a twelvemonth amid mud and debris, — 
though certain of the hardier kinds might survive such 
treatment, by miracle alone could the preponderating 
majority of the class be preserved." 

Such are some of the difficulties that present them- 
selves against that interpretation of the Scriptures which 
makes the deluge universal ; and it must be admitted, 
we think, that they are difficulties of such a nature that 



520 NATURAL HISTORY. 

miracles alone could overcome them. Here then we are 
brought to one of two alternatives; either we must 
believe that all these unrecorded miracles were actually 
performed ; or, we must concede that the deluge was 
universal only in reference f o mankind, and not to 
the entire globe of the earth. Let us consider both 
alternatives. 

First, we look at the miraculous side. Does the 
sacred narrative state, or does it imply that such a vast 
and diversified number of miracles took place ? Or, is 
the tenor of the language such that we are warranted 
by any fair and legitimate rule of interpretation to infer 
that they were actually performed ? We are constrained 
to answer, No. On the contrary, miraculous power ap- 
pears to have been employed sparingly. While the 
deluge was of God's appointment, and while his wisdom 
and omnipotence presided over all, yet there was no 
needless display or expenditure of Divine power. What- 
ever Noah was able to accomplish for the preservation 
of himself and family, he was required to do ; and what- 
ever natural agencies were adequate to effect in the 
accomplishment of God's purpose, they were employed 
for that end. God did not provide an ark, but Noah 
was commanded to build one. God did not by his im- 
mediate power retain the creatures within it, each in 
its proper place, but Noah was directed to partition the 
ark into rooms or "nests" for them according to their 
natures and necessities. God did not feed and sustain 
them by a miracle, but Noah was bidden to gather all 
kinds of food for them. God did not suspend their 



NATURAL HISTORY. 521 

physiological functions so that they could dispense with 
light and air, but instructed Noah to finish the ark 
above in an aperture, or window, extending its whole 
length so as to provide both. And in the production 
of the Flood itself we see natural elements and agencies, 
working according to their established laws, employed 
from its beginning to its close; — the rain descended, the 
waters issuing from their natural receptacles, their 
gradual subsidence, the blowing of the wind, the evap- 
oration and drying up of the ground. We do not say 
that the deluge was brought about solely by natural 
causes — the hand and counsel of God undoubtedly were 
concerned in it — but what we desire the reader to notice 
is, that there was a marked economy observed in the 
exercise of miraculous power. " It is remarkable," says 
Dr. Chalmers, "that God is sparing of miracles, and 
seems to prefer the ordinary processes of nature, if 
equally effectual for the accomplishment of his purposes. 
He might have saved Noah and his family by miracles ; 
but he is not prodigal of these, and so he appointed that 
an ark should be made to bear up the living cargo which 
was to be kept alive on the surface of the waters ; and 
not only so, but he respects the laws of animal physi- 
ology, as he did those of hydrostatics, in that he put 
them by pairs into the ark, male and female, to secure 
their transmission to after ages ; and food was stored up 
to sustain them during their long confinement. In short, 
he dispenses with miracles when these are not requisite 
for the fulfilment of his ends ; and he never dispenses 
with the ordinary means when these are fitted, and at 



522 NATURAL HISTORY. 

the same time sufficient, for the occasion." * Yet if we 
hold to the interpretation that makes the deluge uni- 
versal, and literally submerges the entire surface of the 
globe, we must, as is undeniable from the above natural 
facts, hold also to the performance of unrecorded miracles 
far surpassing both in number and magnitude all those 
related in the Bible. But we are not shut up to so tre- 
mendous an interpretation as this. There is nothing in 
the sacred narrative to compel us to adopt such a view. 
Let us examine it. 

The perusal of the Bible account of the deluge natu- 
rally enough conveys to the plain reader the impression 
that the whole earth was covered with water. Indeed, 
the terms employed are so definite and strong that he 
could hardly take any other meaning from it. " The 
waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth ; and all 
the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were 
covered." But it is to be borne in mind that this history 
was not written in our language. As nations have their 
peculiar traits of character, so every language has its 
peculiar idiom and genius, and a thorough acquaintance 
with these is indispensable to a correct understanding 
and appreciation of the shades of meaning intended in 
the phraseologies of such a language. The Hebrew 
tongue, in which the diluvial catastrophe was first 
recorded, with its ancient and eastern phraseology, is 
not to be interpreted with the cold exactness that is 
applicable to the modern tongues of western Europe, 
especially in matters relating to physical nature 



* Daily Scri}>turc Readings^ Vol. I., i>. 10. 



NATURAL HISTORY. 523 

There is, as every student of Scripture knows, a 
large class of passages in both the Old and the New Tes- 
tament, which are not to be taken, and in fact cannot be 
taken in their literal and full import; we mean those 
passages in which universal terms are used to signify 
a part. These will be best understood by the quotation 
of a few examples. In numerous places the phrase 
"all the earth" is employed, when only the land of Pales- 
tine is meant. "All countries" it is said, "came into 
Egypt to buy corn," yet it is manifest that only the 
surrounding countries within practical distance of Egypt 
are intended. Of the Hebrew^ nation God saith, " This 
day I will put the dread of thee, and the fear of thee, 
upon the nations that are under the whole heaven;" this 
declaration, as is evident, could have respect only to the 
nations of Canaan and those lying on its frontiers. "A 
decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world 
should be taxed," by which of course nothing more than 
the Roman Empire could be meant, for Caesar's power of 
taxation extended no further. At the day of Pentecost 
it is said that " there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, 
devout men, out of every nation under heaven;" yet in 
the enumeration which immediately follows of the dif- 
ferent places from which those Jews had come, we find 
only a region extending from Italy to Persia, and from 
Egypt to the Euxine — not one-fiftieth part of the earth. 
And it could have been only to about a similar if 
not the same district that Paul referred, when he said 
that "the Gospel had been preached to every creature 
that teas under heaven" Numerous other passages of 



524 NATURAL HISTORY. 

this hyperbolic character may be found in the Scriptures ; 
it was a common mode of exjDression in the East ; and as 
the sacred writers in recording a revelation to men used 
human language, it w r as proper that they should express 
themselves as men ordinarily did, if they wished to have 
their meaning understood. This figure of speech is com- 
monly the effect of surprise, or having the mind so full 
of some object or event, as not to have words adequate 
to express their ideas. 

It will be observed that the universal terms in the 
above quotations are the very same that are used to 
describe the Flood, and that the whole phraseology is 
precisely similar. Now, if it be admitted, as by all it is, 
that the nature of the subjects in those passages limit 
the import of these terms, why should not the same rule 
hold good in regard to their import in the history of the 
deluge ? If the facts of geography respecting the loca- 
tions and territories of the ancient nations are permitted 
to decide the latitude of meaning to be attached to the 
universal terms used in reference to them, why should 
not the indisputable facts of natural history, which offer 
manifold and insurmountable difficulties to their literal 
interpretation, be allowed to limit in likemanner their 
sense in respect to the extent of the Flood? Is it doing 
any more violence to the language of Scripture to say 
that, "the whole earth was covered with water" means 
only the whole earth as far as peopled by man, than to 
say that, "the whole world should be taxed" means 
only the whole world as far as ruled by the Romans? 
We cannot but regard the one limitation just as legiti- 



NATURAL HISTORY. 525 

mate and fair as the other. The deluge had reference 
to mankind, not to territory. And it is perfectly con- 
sistent with established laws of interpretation to under- 
stand Moses, though using these universal terms, as 
describing a judgment limited to the human race, for 
whose punishment solely it was sent. The Deluge was 
universal as to mankind, but limited as to the globe of 
the earth. 

This is no new interpretation of Scripture suggested 
merely by the progress of human science ; it was put 
forth by devout and learned men long before geology 
existed as a science, and long before naturalists had die- 
covered and arranged their present magnificent system 
of zoology. This view of the sacred text was arrived at 
by them on purely exegetical grounds before the diffi- 
culties to a universal deluge from these sciences had 
dawned upon the minds of men ; and the developments 
of the present day go to show that they were right. Out 
of many ready at hand, we quote the words of one or 
two of these authorities. 

Bishop Stillingfleet, who wrote some two hundred 
years ago, a divine of great talents and prodigious learn- 
ing, says, " I cannot see any urgent necessity from the 
Scripture to assert that the flood did spread over all the 
surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the 
ark excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, 
according to the Scriptures. The flood was universal as 
to mankind ; but from thence follows no necessity at all 
of asserting the universality of it as to the globe of the 
earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the whole 



526 NATURAL HISTORY. 

earth was peopled before the Flood, which I despair of 
ever seeing proved." * 

The learned commentator, Matthew Poole, who flour- 
ished in the same century, delivers himself on this sub- 
ject as follows : " It is not to be supposed that the entire 
globe of the earth was covered with water. Where 
was the need of overwhelming those regions in which 
there were no human beings? It would be highly 
unreasonable to suppose that mankind had so increased 
before the deluge, as to have penetrated to all the 
corners of the earth. Absurd it would be to affirm that 
the effects of the punishment inflicted upon men alone 
applied to places in which there were no men. If then 
we should entertain the belief that not so much as the 
hundredth part of the globe was overspread with water, 
still the deluge would be universal, because the extirpa- 
tion took effect upon all the part of the world which was 
inhabited." f 

To these we may add the views of recent writers. Dr. 
J. Pye Smith, after referring to scriptural instances in 
which universal terms were to be understood in a limited 
sense, says: "From these instances of the scriptural 
idiom in the application of phraseology similar to that in 
the narrative concerning the Flood, I humbly think that 
those terms do not oblige us to understand a literal 
universality; so that we arc exonerated from some 
otherwise insuperable difficulties in Natural History and 
Geology. If so much of the earth was overflowed as was 



* Origfaies S«cr<r, Lib. 3, o. 4. 



t Synopsis, on Gen. vii. 10. 



NATURAL HISTORY. 527 

occupied by the human race, both the physical and the 
moral ends of that awful visitation were answered." * 

The following statements to the same effect are made 
by Rev. David King, LL.D., of Glasgow, in a recent 
work : " Our best expositors of Scripture are now gener- 
ally of opinion that the Flood, though extensive, was 
local. If we adopt the principle which the Scripture 
itself so unequivocally sanctions — that general terms 
may be used with a limited sense — the whole account is 
simple and consistent. A deluge of great extent inun- 
dated the dry land. In respect to men, whom it was 
designed to punish for their wickedness, it was universal, 
excepting only Noah and his family, whom it pleased 
God to spare alive. Along with them were preserved 
such animals as were most useful to them, and such as 
were fitted to fulfil the purposes of Divine Providence 
after the waters should have retired." f 

This interpretation, it will be seen, disposes effectually 
and at once of all the objections urged against the Bible 
deluge on the ground of the insufficient capacity of the 
ark, of the difficulty of collecting all the various animals 
of the globe into one place, and of returning them after- 
ward to their natural local habitations where they are 
now found. In a word, this interpretation of the sacred 
narrative completely and beautifully harmonizes every 
statement of God's word respecting this awful catas- 
trophe with every discovery made by science in all the 
broad field of nature. 

* Scripture and Geology, p. 247, etc. 

t Principles of Geology Explained, pp. 56, 61. 



528 NATURAL HISTORY. 

In putting forth the opinion that the Deluge was par- 
tial as to the surface of the earth, we set aside, not the 
sacred narrative, but the common interpretation put upon 
it. While we differ and deport from the popular notion 
of the superficial extent of thk waters of this great and 
terrible Flood, we hold with unyielding faith to the 
authenticity and full inspiration of its history as given 
us by Moses, the man of God — we hold to the physical 
character of the Deluge, to the Divine agency in it, and 
to the moral purpose to be accomplished by it. But 
while we believe all this, and regard it to be a fact of 
great moral significance that our race was thus early 
destroyed for their wickedness, we do not regard it to 
be a matter of the least moral or spiritual importance, 
whether or no the destructive element employed for 
this purpose rolled on its billows over dreary deserts or 
distant islands where no man was. The extent of the 
Deluge in this respect may be a question of interest in 
physical science, but it concerns religious faith or reli- 
gious duty no more than the true figure of the earth or 
the motions of the heavenly bodies. 

4. How the Deluge tvas produced. — "All the fountains 
of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of 
heaven were opened." These forcible and striking ex- 
pressions, though highly figurative, no doubt set forth 
physical events of a stupendous character that actually 
took place; though we may not be able to state precisely 
or definitely what these were, yet we have many reasons 
to suppose that they were the results of natural agencies, 
operating according to their established laws, under the 



NATURAL HISTORY. 529 

direction and control of the Almighty; and the best 
comment, doubtless, that can be offered on the words is 
supplied by what are known to have produced similar 
cataclysms in other and remoter periods of our world's 
eventful history. 

In regard to the terms employed by the sacred histo- 
rian we may just remark that by "the breaking up of 
the fountains of the great deep," we are to understand, 
not as some of the old writers represent, an eruption of 
waters from extended subterranean seas or lakes, which 
we have no reason to believe have an existence, but the 
inrushing upon the land of the waters from their vast 
ocean receptacles, so frequently spoken of in Scripture as 
" the great deep." And by " the opening of the windows 
or sluices of heaven," probably nothing more is meant 
than remarkably heavy and continued rains, or, as we 
sometimes express ourselves, torrents of rain. 

In our attempt to gain as correct and intelligent a 
view as possible of this great catastrophe, let us avail 
ourselves of what light modern investigations may serve 
to throw upon it. If we take a slender brass or iron 
hoop, and with the finger press it inward at any point, it 
will necessarily bulge out on either side in proportion to 
the depression made by the finger ; and conversely, if we 
push it outward, the parts on this side and on that side 
of the point of pressure will be drawn inward . Now, 
similar results are produced in the earth's crust by the 
pressure of subterranean forces ; the elevation by these 
of a continent, or of any considerable part of a continent, 
will be attended by a corresponding depression of the 

34 



530 NATURAL HISTORY. 

bed of the adjoining ocean; or, the elevation of that 
ocean's bed will necessarily be followed by a depression 
of the continent. This is not mere theory, but an 
established fact. At this present time, while Scandi- 
navia on one side of the North Atlantic is steadily 
rising from its waters, Greenland on the other side is as 
steadily sinking into them. This fact, if borne in mind, 
may help us to a conception of the manner in which the 
deluge might have been brought about. 

Noah and the living creatures to be preserved with 
him having been safely lodged in the ark, and the fatal 
hour decreed having arrived, let us suppose that, at the 
behest of Omnipotence, the ocean heels encompassing 
that region of the globe inhabited by the antediluvians 
had been elevated step by step by the repeated impulses 
of subterranean forces, occurring, as they often do, at 
intervals of one, two or three days; and that at the same 
time the whole of that region, and to a distance beyond, had 
subsided at the same rate : — what would have been the 
consequences of all this? what would have taken place in 
the ocean, and what would have befallen the land and 
its occupants ? The answer to this question is not diffi- 
cult, and we need not travel back far in time to find it. 

On the 13th of August, 1868, there occurred a fearful 
and most destructive earthquake on the Pacific coast of 
South America ; those who perished by it were counted 
by tens of thousands, whilst the property destroyed 
could only be estimated by millions of dollars. The 
crust of the earth was swayed and upheaved a distance 
measured along the shore of some 250 miles, while the 



NATURAL HISTORY. 531 

disturbance extended far away under the sea. This 
agitated the ocean into waves of the most extraordinary 
character. At Arica, the centre of the violence, the sea 
was seen to retire, as if about to leave the shores wholly 
dry; but presently its waters returned with tremendous 
force. A mighty wave half a hundred feet high, whose 
length seemed immeasurable, was seen advancing like a 
dark wall upon the unfortunate city, a large part of 
which was overwhelmed by it ; while two ships of war 
were carried far beyond the town, and there left stranded 
high and dry. At Chala, three such waves • swept in, 
and overflowed nearly the whole town, the sea passing 
more than half a mile beyond its usual limits. At Islay 
and Iquique similar phenomena were witnessed. At the 
former place the sea flowed in no less than five times, 
and each time with greater force. Afterward the motion 
gradually diminished, but even an hour and a half after 
the commencement of this strange disturbance, the 
waves still ran forty feet above the ordinary level. At 
Iquique, the people beheld the inrushing wave while it 
was still a great way off. A dark-blue mass of water, 
some fifty feet in height, was sweeping in upon the town 
with inconceivable rapidity. An island lying before the 
harbor was completely submerged by the great wave, 
which still came rushing on, black with the mud and 
slime it had swept from the sea-bottom. Many buildings 
were washed away, and in the low-lying parts of the 
town there was a terrible loss of life. 

This great ocean wave swept in all directions around 
the earth-throe, travelling at the rate of from 250 to 400 



532 NATURAL HISTORY. 

nautical miles an hour. In less than three hours after 
the occurrence of the earthquake, it reached and inun- 
dated the port of Coquimbo, in Chili, some 800 miles 
from Arica ; and an hour later arrived at Constitucion, 
450 miles still farther south, where for some three hours 
the sea rose and fell with strange violence. On the 
other hand, it travelled with equal swiftness northward, 
and swept the shores of southern California, rising 
upward of sixty feet above the ordinary sea-level, and 
presenting the most imposing of all the effects of the 
great shock. Even in San Pedro Bay, full 5000 miles 
from the centre of disturbance, a wave twice the height 
of an ordinary house rolled in with unspeakable violence 
only a few hours after the earthquake. 

Not only did this fearful billow rush in upon the 
shores, the tremendous energy of the upheaving force 
sent it also outward into the open ocean. The Sandwich 
Islands, which lie 6300 miles from Arica, it might be 
imagined, would have been safe from its effects. But on 
that very night the sea around this group rose in a sur- 
prising manner, insomuch that the inhabitants thought 
the islands were sinking, and would shortly lie beneath 
the waves. Some of the smaller islands, indeed, were 
for a time completely submerged. Before long, however, 
the sea fell again, and as it did so the people were under 
the impression that the islands were rising bodily out of 
the water. For no less than three days this strange 
oscillation of the sea continued to be experienced, the 
most remarkable ebbs and flows being noticed at Hono- 
lulu. Onward, and still onward, over the broad bosom 



NATURAL HISTORY. 533 

of the Pacific the great sea-wave swept, and on the 14th 
reached Japan, where, 10,500 miles from Arica, enormous 
billows poured in succession upon the shores, — having 
travelled over considerably more than two-fifths of the 
earth's circumference, a distance which the swiftest ships 
could not traverse in less than six or seven weeks. 

As over the northern hemisphere, so over the southern 
did this tremendous wave sweep. At about half past 
two on the morning of the 14 th it rolled in upon the 
Samoa Isles ; the watchmen startled the inhabitants from 
their sleep with the cry, that the sea was about to over- 
whelm them; and already, when the terrified people 
rushed upon their houses, the sea was found to have 
risen far above the highest water-mark. But it pres- 
ently began to sink again, and then commenced a series 
of oscillations, which lasted for several days, and were 
of a remarkable nature. It occupied but a little space 
more before the huge billow arrived at the New Zealand 
Islands; four times did the sea retire, and four times 
did it return upon these shores with great power, at 
intervals of about two hours. It finally reached the 
coast of Australia, in five well-marked waves, and then 
gradually subsided. 

Such were the effects of the earthquake of Arica. It 
has been calculated that the width of this immense wave 
varied from 200 to 1000 miles, and that its length in 
mid Pacific could not have been less than 8000 miles. 
Who can contemplate this enormous volume of water 
moving at such a fearful speed, and not be filled with 
awe in view of the power that sent it abroad ! 



534 NATURAL HISTORY. 

Now, to come back to Noah — let us suppose that as 
soon as he and his living cargo had been shut up within 
the ark, the shock of an upheaval, like that of Arica, had 
been given to the ocean beds encompassing that region 
of the earth inhabited by the antediluvians, sending 
forth vast waves similar to the above; and that this 
had been repeated at intervals for many weeks, lifting 
the bottom of the seas higher and higher ; while at the 
same time the coasts and the whole of that region occupied 
by men, as would be the necessary consequence, gradually 
sunk lower and lower ; and that the atmosphere, affected 
by these commotions, poured down torrents of rain : * — 
supposing this to have taken place, and the deluge of 
Noah is before us in all its commotion and terror and 
destruction ; the heavens are darkened by the descend- 
ing torrents — rivers forsake their channels, or flow back 
upon their sources — vast and successive waves are every- 
where rushing across the shores, choking the valleys, 
and overspreading the plains — cities are swept away — 
forests are submerged — and still, day after day, roll in 
the fearful tides, appearing to the doomed population 
as if " the fountains of the great deep were broken up " 
— higher and yet higher rise the waters — "they prevail 
exceedingly" — at length, not a voice is to be heard, not 

* It is worthy of notice, as evidence of the accuracy of Scripture his- 
tory, that just such rains as are indicated by the forcible expression, 
" the windows of heaven were opened," are the usual concomitants of 
Convulsions and cataclysms, such as was the deluge. "Subterranean 
movements and volcanic eruptions," says Lyell, "are often attended, 
not only by incursions of the sea, but also by violent rains.'" — Princi- 
ples of Geology, Vol. I., p. 595. 



NATURAL HISTORY. 535 

a hill, or a mountain top to be seen, under the whole 
heaven ! 

It was after some such manner as this, we may sup- 
pose, the Noahian deluge was brought about; at any 
rate, many of our eminent geologists hold that some of 
the formidable cataclysms of the pre- Adamite periods 
were occasioned in this way, by the sudden upheaval of 
vast tracts of the sea-bed, which, by displacing great 
bodies of water, and rolling them outwards in the form 
of enormous waves, inundated wide regions elevated 
hundreds of feet over the ocean level, and strewed them 
over with the clays, gravels, and organic remains of 
deep sea bottoms. 

After the lapse of some five months, or 150 days, the 
deluge of Scripture began to subside, and continued to 
do so, till, at the end of a year and ten days, the water 
was gone, and the ground left dry once more. This, we 
are left to suppose, was effected by a reversal of the 
order of the events by which the Flood was brought on, 
namely, by the subsidence of the ocean beds to their 
former depths, and the elevation of the lands to the 
height at which they stood before. As these two 
changes were gradually going on, the waters, aided by 
the propelling " wind which the Lord made to pass over 
the earth," would gradually return to their place in the 
great deep. 

5. Where the ark rested. — The Scripture account of 
the deluge, definite as it may seem to the general reader, 
does not enable us to determine the locality at which 
the favored occupants of the ark disembarked. And 



536 NATURAL HISTORY. 

where the scene of a great event, which transpired in 
the remote past, is not settled by the definite statements 
of authentic history, it is not uncommon for various 
localities to put forth their claims to have been that 
scene ; no less than seven cities contend for the honor of 
having given birth to the poet Homer, and the scene of 
our Saviour's transfiguration has been laid on three dif- 
ferent and distant mountains, Tabor, Hermon, and the 
Mount of Olives. In likemanner various locations have 
claimed the honor and distinction of having been the 
resting-place of Noah's ark. 

The earliest tradition that has come down to us fixed 
this memorable event in a mountain range of Kurdistan. 
This was the common belief among the Chaldeans ; and 
the Syriac translators and commentators, and all the 
Syrian Churches, have followed the same. 

A very remarkable record of the Flood and the ark 
has recently been brought to light from the ruins of the 
palace of King Assurbanipal, at Nineveh. It was found 
inscribed on a tablet. The narration is delivered in the 
person of the rescued (Noah). This legend appears to 
be a copy of a still older record, made for this monarch's 
library ; the original composition, in the opinion of Mr. 
George Smith of the British Museum, must have been 
written as early as the seventeenth century before the 
Christian era, and perhaps much earlier. The inscrip- 
tion is in the form of verse, and is quite lengthy. 
Assured that it will be of interest to the reader, we 
quote what relates to the stranding of the ark — it is 
as follows : 



NATURAL HISTORY. 



537 



Six days and nights 

passed, the wind tempest and storm, overwhelmed, 
on the seventh day in its course, was calmed the storm, and all the 
tempest 

which had destroyed like an earthquake, 

quieted. The sea he caused to dry, and the wind and tempest ended. 
I was carried through the sea. The doer of evil, 
and the whole of mankind who turned to sin, 
like reeds their corpses floated. 

I opened the window and the light broke in, over my refuge 
it passed, I sat still and 
over my refuge came peace. 

I was carried over the shore, at the boundary of the sea, 
for twelve measures it ascended over the land. 
To the country of Nizir, went the ship ; 

the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship, and to pass over it, it was 
not able. 

The first day and the second day, the mountain of Kizir the same. 
The third day and the fourth day, the mountain of Nizir the same. 
The fifth and sixth, the mountain of Nizir the same. 
On the seventh day in the course of it 

I sent forth a dove, and it left. The dove went and searched, and 
a resting-place it did not find, and it returned. 

I sent forth a swallow and it left. The swallow went and searched, and 
a resting-place it did not find, and it returned. 
I sent forth a raven, and it left. 

The raven went, and the corpses on the waters it saw, and 

it did eat, it swam, and wandered away, and did not return. 

I sent the animals forth to the four winds. I poured out a libation. 

I built an altar on the peak of the mountain, 

by seven herbs I cut, 

at the bottom of them, I placed reeds, pines, and simgar. 
The gods collected at its burning, the gods collected at its good 
burning. 

The gods like sumbe over the sacrifice gathered. 

Respecting the place where the ark rested, Mr. Smith 
observes, "The difference between the Bible and the 
inscription as to where the ark rested is more apparent 



538 NATURAL HISTORY. 

than real. The Bible says Ararat; Berosus says the 
Gordicean mountains, and commentators are inclined to 
locate Ararat in the Gordisean mountains east of Assyria. 
The inscription calls the mountain Nizir, which accord- 
ing to an inscription of Assur-nazir-pal, King of Assyria, 
who made an expedition thither, lay east of Assyria, and 
formed part of a series of mountain chains extending to 
the northwest into Armenia." 

A tradition of a later date than the above, and the 
one which has been commonly adopted by the Christians 
of the West, makes the ark to have rested on a great 
and remarkable mountain in the north of Armenia. 
Such influence had this tradition on the popular belief, 
as in course of time to give to that towering eminence 
the name of Ararat — as if no doubt could be entertained 
that it was the Ararat of the Scriptures. This mountain 
rises immediately out of the plain of the Araxes, and 
terminates in two conical peaks, named the Greater and 
Lesser Ararat, about seven miles distant from each 
other; the former of which attains an elevation of 
17,2G0 feet above the level of the sea, and about 14,000 
above the plain of the Araxes, while the latter is lower 
by about 4000 feet. The higher peak for about 4000 
feet down from its summit is covered with eternal ice 
and snow. Viewed from the plain it is a mountain of 
aspect unsurpassed in grandeur. Nothing can be more 
beautiful in form, nothing more awful in height. "It 
was not until we had arrived upon the ilat plain," says 
Sir R. K. Porter, " that I beheld Ararat in all its ampli- 
tude of grandeur. From the spot on which I stood, it 



NATURAL HISTORY. 539 

appeared as if the highest mountains of the world had 
been piled upon each other, to form this one sublime 
immensity of earth, and rock, and snow. The icy peaks 
of its double head rose majestically into the clear and 
cloudless heavens; the sun blazed bright upon them, 
and the reflection sent forth dazzling radiance equal to 
other suns. My eye, not able to rest for any length of 
time upon the blinding glory of its summits, wandered 
down the apparently interminable sides, till I could no 
longer trace their vast lines in the mists of the horizon ; 
when an irrepressible impulse immediately carrying my 
eye upwards again, refixed my gaze on the awful glare 
of Ararat ; and this bewildered sensibility of sight being 
answered by a similar feeling in the mind, for some 
moments I was lost in a strange suspension of the powers 
of thought." 

Various attempts were made in different ages to ascend 
this tremendous mountain pyramid, but in vain. In the 
year 1700, Tournefort, a French traveller, undertook to 
reach its summit ; long he persevered in the face of many 
difficulties, but was foiled in the end. Early in the pres- 
ent century the Pasha of Bayazeed attempted its ascent, 
but with no better success. It was not until 1829, that 
this difficult and perilous feat was accomplished ; when 
Professor Parrot, a German, acting under Russian aus- 
pices, after having been twice repelled by the snowy 
crest, in his third attempt succeeded, and stood upon the 
mountain's summit. He found himself on a slightly 
convex and almost circular platform, about 220 feet in 
diameter, which at the extremity declined steeply on 



540 NATURAL HISTORY. 

all sides. This was the silver crest of Ararat, composed 
of eternal ice, unbroken by a rock or stone. Parrot and 
his companions spent three-quarters of an hour on the 
summit, and then after planting an oaken cross thereon, 
descended. In descending, "it was a glorious sight," 
he relates, "to behold the dark shadows which the 
mountains on the west cast upon the plain, and then the 
profound darkness which covered all the valleys, and 
which rose gradually higher and higher on the side of 
Ararat, whose icy summit was still illumined by the 
beams of the setting sun." 

From the foregoing description, it is sufficiently 
apparent that the ascent or descent of the mountain to 
which tradition has given the name Ararat, is an 
achievement beset with difficulties and perils all but 
superhuman. And hence it must be evident to common 
sense that its summit could not have been the resting- 
place of the ark, and the spot where all its living tenants 
were disembarked. For how possibly could these have 
found their way in safety down to the habitable region 
far below ? To say nothing of the family of Noah, the 
heavier beasts, without miraculous aid must have slidden 
and rolled and been dashed in pieces over its icy preci- 
pices, and without miraculous protection the lighter and 
more delicate creatures in their attempts to creep slowly 
down would have been frozen to death before they had 
reached half way to a congenial climate. But no such 
miraculous interposition is recorded, nor even an intima- 
tion given that it took place. 

Sir R. K. Porter, whose vivid description we have just 



NATURAL HISTORY. 541 

quoted, seeing plainly this insuperable difficulty, con- 
ceived the idea, that the ark rested in the space between 
the two peaks of Ararat, and not on the top of either. 
But neither can this opinion be maintained. If the ark 
rested in this intervening space, the tops of both peaks 
must have been above the surface of the waters, and 
must have been visible from the ark. But the sacred 
history states particularly that nothing but one wide 
waste of waters was to be seen at the time the ark 
rested, and that it was not until the subsidence of 
the Flood had been going on for two months and a 
half longer, that the tops of the mountains became 
visible. — It is obvious, therefore, that we must look away 
from what is now called Ararat for the resting-place of 
the ark. 

The words of the Sacred Narrative, " upon the moun- 
tains of Ararat," cannot either with propriety or correct- 
ness of language be applied to any single eminence such 
as the above; the expression is in a plural form, and 
may be applied to a mountainous district, but not to an 
isolated peak. As by the terms, " mountains of Israel," 
" mountains of Samaria," " mountains of Abarim," is 
meant the mountainous districts of those countries ; 
so by "mountains of Ararat" we are to understand a 
mountainous district of country distinguished by that 
name. The word Ararat occurs in three other places in 
the original Scriptures : 2 Kings xix. 37 ; Isaiah xxxvii. 
38 ; and Jeremiah li. 27 — in Kings and Isaiah it is trans- 
lated Armenia, and it is now held by our highest Biblical 
authorities that what is intended in the narrative of the 



542 NATURAL HISTORY. 

deluge by "mountains of Ararat" is the mountainous 
region of Armenia, that is, the Armenian Plateau, which 
extends far south and east of the mountain peak now 
called Ararat. 

This Plateau raises its broad and long and rugged 
back, like an island, from a Sea of Plain, to the various 
heights of two, three, and even four thousand feet above 
its general level. It does not anywhere rise to a sharp 
or well-defined central crest, but expands into plains or 
steppes separated by a graduated series of subordinate 
ranges. It is in general far more accessible, both from 
without and from within, than other districts of similar 
elevation. The passes, though high, are comparatively 
easy, and there is no district which is shut out from 
communication with its neighbors. Thus constituted, 
this plateau was a natural resting-place for the ark as 
the deluge subsided, while its geographical position was 
eminently favorable for the general distribution of the 
men and animals that should afterward spring from 
those saved in it. This highland region of country 
occupied a central position between the Euxine and 
Caspian Seas on the north, and between the Persian 
Gulf and the Mediterranean on the south. With the 
first of these it is connected by the Acampis, with the 
second by the Araxes, with the third by the Tigris and 
Euphrates, the latter of which also serves as an outlet 
towards the countries on the Mediterranean coast. 
These seas wore the high roads of primitive civilization, 
and the plains watered by these rivers wore the seats of 
the most powerful nations of antiquity, the Assyrians, 



NATURAL HISTORY. 543 

the Babylonians, the Medes, and the Colchians. Hence 
Armenia has come to be regarded as the centre from 
which the earth was overspread with its present popu- 
lation. 

We have now reviewed the main points in the history 
of the Noahian Deluge, and trust have made it apparent, 
that the Sacred Record embodies not a statement, that is 
not in harmony with the known operations of nature ; 
not a statement indeed, but is sustained and corroborated 
by the most recent developments of science. Every fact 
stated in relation to this great cataclysm, and to the ark 
and its rescued inmates, fairly interpreted, is found to be 
in entire accordance with all that has been established, 
whether by geology, physical geography, or natural 
history. The objections which were wont to be urged 
against the Bible on this ground have lost what seeming 
force they once possessed, and the credibility of the 
Mosaic account was never made so apparent as it is 
by the light of the present day. And thus the great 
lesson of this tremendous judgment still stands unclouded 
in the sight of all the world : 

"There is a time, and Justice marks the date, 
For long-forbearing clemency to wait ; 
That hour elapsed, th' incurable revolt 
Is punished, and down comes the thunderbolt."— Cowper. 

Let not this fearful lesson be lost upon the present 
generation. Let not the fact be overlooked, that its 
prime procuring cause was identical with the spirit, 
which, in our own day, seeks to sap the foundations of 
all morality and religion— a denial and disregard of the 



544 



NATURAL HISTORY. 



Presence and Agency and Providence of God in the world. 
This was the evil seed which ripened into the abounding 
harvest of iniquity which called forth the catastrophe of 
the Deluge, and therein revealed the Almighty in the 
character of an avenging J udge. 

In the contemplation of this dark cloud of wrath, we 
should not, however, be unmindful of the beams of mercy 
that, in the end, broke radiant through its darkest folds. 
There is something unspeakably gracious in the spirit of 
the promise made to Noah, as he and his family set foot on 
the purged and renovated earth, that the waters, which 
had displayed such a scene of terror to them, " should 
no more destroy all flesh." And to allay their fears and 
to restore confidence, he condescends even to confirm his 
word by a visible token in the clouds. And oh : 

When, o'er the green, undeluged earth, 

Heaven's covenant thou didst shine, 
How came the world's gray fathers forth 

To watch thy sacred sign ! 
And, while its yellow lustre smiled 

O'er mountains yet untrod, 
Each mother held aloft her child, 

To bless the bow of God. 
How glorious is thy girdle cast 

O'er mountain, tower and town, 
Or mirror'd in the ocean vast, 

A thousand fathoms down. 
As fresh in yon horizon dark, 

Ah young thy beauties seem, 
As when the eagle from the ark 

First sported in thy beam. 
For, faithful to its sacred page, 

Heaven still rebuilds thy span, 
Nor lets the type grow dim with age, 

That first spoke peace to man.— Campbell. 



Statistics 

AND 

The Multiplication of the Hebrews. 

There are a power and tendency in human beings to increase so rapidly, that 
in point of fact, it is only in a few favored spots that they do increase at the 
full rate of their capacity. — MALTHUS. 




The Israelites planted in the province of Goshen : I. The original 

NUMBER OF SETTLERS THERE ; 2. THE RATE OF THEIR INCREASE ; 3. THE 
LENGTH OF THEIR STAY : COMPUTATION FROM THESE DATA. 

546 




Statistics 

AND 

The Multiplication of the Hebrews. 



HE revelation made by God to man, after 
his fall, was committed to the race in gen- 
eral ; no one particular family or tribe was 
chosen to be its special custodian. Under 
this economy, after the lapse of a few gen- 
erations only, the result was that that reve- 
lation became so obscured, perverted and 
neglected as to be well-nigh lost from the world. After 
the Flood, the renewed knowledge of the character and 
worship of God was in like manner intrusted to the 
children of Noah indiscriminately; and again within a 
comparatively brief period, all correct and worthy views 
of the Divine Being rapidly vanished from among man- 
kind, and were as rapidly succeeded by the spirit and 
practice of idolatry. Kevealed truth having been thus 
twice committed to the race in general, and been twice 
all but lost, it became necessary to place it under some 
special guardianship, and to surround it by a system of 

547 




548 sta TISTICS. 

significant and peculiar ordinances, in order to its preser- 
vation. For this end God made choice of the seed of 
Abraham. Over this elect people, therefore, He exer- 
cised special supervision, ordering their movements, 
and appointing to them their dwelling places. For a 
time it was ordained that they should sojourn as 
strangers in the Land of Canaan, a land which it was 
promised them, they should afterward receive as their 
own absolute inheritance. Meanwhile they were carried 
down into Egypt, where, in the wonder-working provi- 
dence of God, they had assigned to them the rich and 
j)leasant province of Goshen for the place of their habita- 
tion. Here, through the influence of Joseph, they dwelt 
in royal favor for a season ; and under the special bless- 
ing of Heaven, multiplied and prospered exceedingly. 
But time brought on its inevitable changes; Joseph's 
generation passed away, and another generation came. 
At length their numbers and wealth reached a point 
that filled the Egyptians with alarm, lest the people 
should become more and mightier than themselves, and 
eventually aided by enemies assume the mastery of the 
whole land. To arrest their prosperity and retard their 
multiplication, therefore, a system of galling oppression 
was adopted towards them. " They did set over them 
taskmasters to afflict them with burdens. And the 
Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with 
rigor; and they made their lives bitter with hard bond- 
age, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service 
in the field." Moreover, they ultimately sought to 
destroy their male children by casting them into the 



STATISTICS. 549 

river. "And the children of Israel sighed by reason of 
the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto 
God." And the Lord heard them, and appeared unto 
Moses in the far-off land of Midian, and said unto him, 
"I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are 
in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their 
taskmasters ; for I know their sorrows, and I am come 
down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, 
and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land 
and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey. 
Come now, therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, 
that thou mayest bring forth my people out of Egypt." 
But Pharaoh would not let the people go. After a series 
of miraculous inflictions both upon himself and his 
people, however, he was obliged to consent to their 
departure. "And the children of Israel gat them up, and 
departed out of Egypt, about 600,000 men, beside 
children. And a mixed multitude went up also with 
them, and flocks and herds, even very much cattle." 
Such, in brief, is the record of the Hebrews' sojourn in 
the land of Egypt. 

This account is held to involve a serious difficulty, 
and which has been vehemently urged by the enemies 
of the Bible as an argument against its credibility. This 
difficulty lies in their vast and extraordinary multiplica- 
tion during their stay in Goshen; and the objection 
based upon it is usually put something after this 
manner : 

" We are told that the family of Jacob, numbering in 
all seventy souls, went down into Egypt and dwelt 



550 STATISTICS. 

there; and that after a period which could not have ex- 
ceeded 215 years, their descendants numbered more than 
600,000 males, twenty years old and upward ; and these, 
according to the usual ratio, represent an aggregate popu- 
lation of nearly two and a half millions of both sexes 
and all ages. Such an increase has never been known, 
and is at variance with the established laws of physiology. 
The Bible history of this people, therefore, is incredible, 
and must be rejected." 

This objection, we own, carries on its face the appear- 
ance of force; and if the data upon which it is based 
were correct and embraced all the facts in the record, it 
must be admitted that it would prove fatal to the cred- 
ibility of the sacred history. But this we now under- 
take to prove is far from being the case, and that the 
objectors do not fairly interpret the inspired narrative. 

The exact number of able-bodied men among the 
Israelites, according to the actual reckoning made by 
Moses shortly after their departure from Egypt, was 
003,550. In this class we may fairly include all between 
the ages of 20 and 70.* Now the proportion of this class 
to the whole population, as indicated by the Census 
Tables of the United States, is as 1 to 3.G3. Computing, 
then, after this ratio, the total number of Hebrews that 
went out of Egypt amounted to 2,190,880 souls. 

*Tho age of seventy years cannot be regarded as too advanced a 
limit fori hat period and people. "And now," said Joshua, " lo 1 am 
this day fourscore and five years old : as yet I am as strong this day as 
I was in the day that Moses sent me ; as my strength was then, even so 
is my strength now, for war, both to go out and to come in."—, ToshxM 
xiv. 10, 11. 



STATISTICS. 551 

Now, in order to determine what weight there is in the 
objection before us, and to pronounce intelligently upon 
the correctness of the Scripture statement respecting the 
multiplication of this people in Egypt, and their number 
at their departure thence, three things must be con- 
sidered — the original number of settlers in Goshen, the 
rate at which they increased, and the length of time 
they remained there. Let us then endeavor to ascertain, 

First, What ivas the original number of settlers in 
Goshen from whom the people of the "exodus" sprang. 
This is put down in the objectors argument as " seventy 
souls." These words, it is admitted, are to be found in 
the Scripture, for thus we read, " All the souls of the 
house of Jacob, which went down into Egypt," were three- 
score and ten." But when we come to examine the 
record more closely and in detail, we discover, first, that 
these seventy souls comprise only the men, with two 
exceptions only, who for certain reasons are singled out 
to be included in this list with the males. The married 
daughters and granddaughters of Jacob are not men- 
tioned, yet these, according to the uniform ratio of the 
sexes, must have been about equal in number with his 
sons and grandsons. Here, then, we at once double the 
number stated in the objection. Again, in the "seventy 
souls " no account is taken of the wives of J acob's sons 
and grandsons ; nor again of the husbands of his daugh- 
ters and granddaughters. Supplying all these omissions, 
we have for the family of Jacob as it entered Egypt, reck- 
oning the household of Joseph, who was there already, 
instead of seventy souls, about four times that number. 



552 STA TISTICS. 

But even this is far from being all. The children of 
Israel entered Egypt with their "households" (taph), or 
retainers. What the size of a patriarchal household 
often was, we may gather from the history of Abraham, 
who at an hours notice was able to call out 318 trained 
servants, capable of active military service. All these, 
we are told, " were born in his house," words that imply 
that he had other servants that might have been 
employed on this occasion, some " bought with money 
from strangers," and some acquired as " gifts," like those 
presented to him in Egypt. From all these facts, the 
most moderate and cautious estimate cannot make the 
entire number of Abraham's household less than 2500 
souls. He was, in fact, one of the most powerful chiefs 
of the land, and one of these, Heth, addresses him as : 
" My lord, thou art a mighty prince among us." 

Now, we have several reasons for believing that 
Jacob's " household," on going down to Egypt, was far 
more numerous than that of Abraham. So strong was 
Jacob even on his return from Padan-Aram that his 
offended brother Esau did not think it wise or safe to 
meet him with less than "four hundred armed men." 
And the princely gift which he made Esau, in the hope 
of reconciliation, offers a similar indication of his great 
wealth and power. Supposing that present to have been 
a tenth part of all he possessed, the proportion Abraham 
thought a fit offering to a king, then Jacob's possessions 
must have numbered 2200 goats, 2200 sheep, GOO 
camels, 500 oxen, and 300 asses. Such was the family, 
and such the property Jacob had acquired in the twenty 



STATISTICS. 553 

years he spent with Laban, beginning with naked hands. 
What then must have been the increase of his house- 
hold, and of his herds and flocks, aided by all his twelve 
active sons in the course of thirty-three years more, or at 
the time of his going down into Egypt? Besides all this, 
J acob came into possession at once by inheritance of at 
least one-half the retainers and property owned by his 
father Isaac, who died some ten years after his return to 
Canaan. From all these facts, we think it obvious that 
the household of J acob when he set out for Egypt, which 
in fact embraced the twelve distinct households of his 
sons, including the numerous retinue of Joseph, far out- 
numbered that of Abraham, and that we cannot put it 
down at less than 3600 souls, or an average of 300 only 
for each tribe. 

To all the foregoing is to be added the fact that 
Goshen, when assigned to the children of Israel, had 
already its scattered inhabitants of various " strangers," 
who amounted, we may safely say, to not less than 700 
throughout that large and fertile province. These would 
naturally become incorporated and amalgamated with 
the dominant tribe, both in blood and religion ; so that 
the whole population would soon be named and num- 
bered as Hebrews. 

We have, then, an aggregate of 4300 original settlers 
in Goshen, from whom were to spring the people of 
the exodus. No one that will study and candidly weigh 
the above facts — facts all embraced in the sacred record 
— can put their number at a lower figure. 

Second, What teas the probable rate a* ivhich tliey 



554 STATISTICS. 

increased'? All things in the situation, circumstances, 
and relations of the Hebrews, in Goshen, were eminently 
favorable to rapid multiplication. Their climate was 
mild and salubrious, their territory large and fertile, 
capable of supporting a population of several millions. 
The lands would produce of many things two crops a 
year and of some things a crop every month. Maize, 
millet, rice, lentiles, pulse, figs, dates, olives, grapes, 
melons, and esculent roots, as also wheat, rye, barley, 
etc., could have been raised there, as the present condi- 
tion of the country demonstrates, with little labor and in 
the greatest abundance. The increase of the population, 
therefore, was subject to no check arising from soil or 
climate ; on the contrary, they were most favorably con- 
ditioned in regard to both. 

At first, and for some length of time after, they also 
enjoyed all the advantages that could flow from royal 
favor; these would have their attraction, and in the hope 
of sharing directly or indirectly in them, many would 
naturally flock in from all sides, and take up their abode 
among them, and thus materially help to swell their 
numbers in time. 

Enjoying the freedom and following the simplicity of 
a pastoral life, we learn that this people were remark- 
ably healthy and vigorous. It was the testimony of 
the midwives to Pharaoh, that " the Hebrew women 
were not as the Egyptians, but were lively," that is 
quick and strong in bringing forth, so that " they were 
delivered ere they came in unto them." And when, 
at length, the people assembled for their departure out 



STATISTICS. 555 

of the country, we read that " there was not one feeble 
person among them." 

Further, the region of Egypt was ever famous for its 
fertility in men. The sexes matured and married young, 
often as early as the age of fourteen or fifteen ; both 
Pliny and Seneca speak of this ; and Aristotle informs 
us that three at a birth was nothing uncommon. What- 
ever there was in the region conducive to this fecundity 
was no doubt shared to the full by the Hebrews. 

With all the above, we must not omit to mention the 
special blessing of God which was upon them and their 
children for their increase. This had been expressly 
and repeatedly promised, to Abraham and Isaac and 
Jacob. Accordingly we read of them, while yet in 
Goshen, "And the children of Israel were fruitful, and 
increased abundantly, and multiplied, and were exceed- 
ing mighty, and the land was filled with them." 

Now, since in ordinary circumstances, as Malthus has 
shown, a population tends to double every twenty-five 
years, we are warranted to conclude that the Hebrews, 
under the above extraordinary combination of favora- 
ble circumstances, must have doubled in a considerably 
shorter period. But to make sure that we are on the 
side of truth, we will only say that they doubled every 
twenty-four years. 

Third, What was the duration of their stay in Egypt ? 
This is a question involving several difficulties. We 
have seen that this period is put down in the objector's 
argument at 215 years; but we cannot receive this 
reckoning of the time as correct. However, not to 



556 



STATISTICS. 



interrupt our argument with a discussion of the point 
here, we will admit for the present, that their sojourn 
in Goshen was but 215 years. 

Having now decided upon these three essential facts, 
namely, that the original number of settlers in Goshen 
was 4300, that the rate at which they increased was 
doubling every 24 years, and that the length of time 
they remained there was 215 years — we are prepared 
to compute the total Hebrew population at the date 
of their exodus, under the direction of Moses. Their 
natural increase would stand as follows : 



4,300 in years. 

8,600 " 24 " 

17,200 " 48 « 

34,400 " 72 " 

68,800 " 96 " 



137,600 in 120 years. 

275,200 11 144 " 

550,400 " 168 " 

1,100,800 " 192 " 

2,201,600 " 216 " 



The above calculation plainly shows us, then, that the 
original settlers of Goshen, according to the natural law 
of increase, in a period of 216 years, would amount to 
a population of 2,200,000 ; and this result, it will be 
observed, is so near that obtained by the actual number- 
ing of the people at Sinai, namely 2,191,000, as to leave 
no reasonable foothold to call in question the credibility 
of the Scripture history on this ground. 

On the preceding page we expressed our dissent from 
the chronology which limits the stay of the Israelites in 
Egypt to a period of 215 years. As this is what has 
created the whole difficulty, and what lends to the 
opposer's argument whatever of seeming force it presents, 
Ave deem it proper and necessary to add a few lines on 



Egyptian Brick-Field. 

And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and 
in all manner of service in the field." 








From a Tomb at Thebes. 



" The countenances of the workmen are perfectly Jewish." — Lit. Gazette. 



558 STA tistics. 

the point. The calculation that gives a period of 215 
years only for the stay of the Israelites in Egypt is 
based upon what are admitted on all hands to be gene- 
alogies of doubtful interpretation, and has come down 
to us from the later Jews by tradition. Though adopted 
by some, it is far from meeting with general acceptance ; 
it is in fact rejected and opposed by many of the most 
distinguished biblical scholars of the day, in Germany, 
England, and America. There are three distinct and 
unequivocal texts of Scripture that appear decisive 
against it. 

Exodus xii. 40, 41, asserts that the Israelites' abode 
in Egypt was 430 years — "Now the sojourning of the 
children of Israel which they sojourned in Egypt was 
four hundred and thirty years. And it came to pass 
at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even 
the selfsame day it came to pass, that the hosts of the 
Lord went out from the land of Egypt." And here is 
found no manuscript variation in the Hebrew text. 

Again, Genesis xv. 13 declares the future servitude 
and affliction, not of Abraham, but of his " seed," to be, 
in round numbers 400 years — a And Jie said unto Abram, 
know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a 
land that is not theirs, and shall serve them, and they 
shall afflict them four hundred years." The idea enter- 
tained by some that this period was to be partly spent 
in Canaan is cut off by the statement that it should be 
" in the land not theirs" — one land too — in strong con- 
trast to the repeated guaranty of the land of Canaan to 
Abraham and his seed as their own. The inclusion of 



STATISTICS. 559 

any part of Abraham's own history in this period of 
servitude and affliction seems forbidden by the positive 
assurance that he should go to his grave in peace, and 
the manifest assignment of this servitude to the distant 
future. Besides, Abraham's residence in Egypt had 
taken place before the above prophecy was uttered. 

The statement of Stephen, in Acts vii. 6, 7, is in 
entire accordance with the foregoing passage and the 
interpretation put upon it — "And God spake on this- 
wise, That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; 
and that they should bring them into bondage and 
entreat them evil four hundred years." 

It is to be observed, however, that Paul, Galatians 
iii. 17, speaks as if 430 years was the lapse of time 
between the promise to Abraham and the giving of the 
Law, but in this he doubtless simply conforms to the 
traditional view of the Jews, and the phraseology of the 
Septuagint, which alone was in the hands of his Gentile 
readers, and because the precise length of time did not 
affect his argument. It was, on any view, 430 years. 

Allowing, then, what the Scripture thus plainly and 
repeatedly declares, that the period spent by the chil- 
dren of Israel in Egypt was, not 215, but 430 years, and 
all difficulty and all doubt, as to their multiplication 
into the numbers said to have followed Moses into the 
wilderness, at once vanish. 

Note.— The assignment of a period of only two hundred and ffteen 
years to the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt has come down to us from 
the Septuagint as the traditional theory ; but in modern times this 
theory, after thorough investigation of all existing data, has been 



560 



STATISTICS. 



strongly opposed. Among those who dissent from it are Rosenmiiller, 
Hofmann, Jahn, Ewald, Gesenius, Winer, Tach, Kurtz, Delitzsch, 
Keil, Knobel, Kaliseh, and many others of similar rank as scholars. 
Neither side of this question is without its difficulties. But, all the 
facts of Sacred History considered, we encounter far less difficulty in 
fixing the time of the sojourn in Egypt at 430 than at 215 years. The 
reader who may wish to pursue further his investigation of this point 
will find it of special advantage to consult what Knobel and Kurtz have 
written on the subject. 



Geology 

AND 

The Wilderness of Sinai. 



The Peninsula of Mount Sinai is, geographically and geologically speaking, 
one of the most remarkable districts on the face of the earth. It combines the 
three grand features of earthly scenery — the Sea, the Desert, and the Mountains. 
And it has a history as unique as its scenery and position. — Dean Stanley. 



36 



56i 



The Wilderness the chosen School of the Israelites : Difficulty in 
regard to their subsistence there : new light from recent in- 
VESTIGATIONS : Its geography and geology : Its mines : Its water 
supplies : Its forests and pasturage : Change in its soil and 
climate : Its ancient capacity for supporting a population : The 
Mosaic history corroborated. 



562 



Geology 



AND 

The Wilderness of Sinai. 



HEN Moses, under the immediate direc- 
tion of God, assembled and led forth the 
hosts of Israel out of Egypt, to take pos- 
session of Canaan, their long-promised 
inheritance, he did not conduct them 
along the direct and usual route, a dis- 
tance of some two hundred miles only, 
and which they might have accomplished with ease in 
less than a month. This did not comport with the plan 
and purpose of Divine Wisdom; they were not then 
fitted to undertake the expulsion of the various warlike 
tribes occupying the land, nor adequately instructed so 
as to settle down in it as the true worshippers and pecu- 
liar people of the one only Living God. It was neces- 
sary, therefore, that they should be schooled — that they 
should be detained by the way, to undergo a prepara- 
tory course of instruction, discipline, and organization. 

Accordingly, as affording a most appropriate theatre for 

563 




564 GEOLOGY. 

all this, they were led by a different and circuitous 
course through the heart of the wilderness of Sinai; 
this made their direct line of march a distance of more 
than 1000 miles, and which, owing to their unbelief and 
rebellion, was attended with such protracted delays, that 
they did not accomplish it until the end of forty years. 

Connected with the stay and wanderings of Israel in 
this wilderness is a matter of apparent, and long thought, 
real difficulty, and which has often been urged as an 
unanswerable argument against the credibility of their 
history — it relates to the subsistence of themselves, and 
of their flocks and herds while in this barren and inhos- 
pitable region. " That wilderness," it has been asserted, 
"is, and always must have been wholly incapable of 
affording an adequate supply of either food or water to a 
horde of more than two millions of people, together with 
their numerous herds and flocks. The Mosaic narrative 
places them in a desert, whose physical destitution and 
desolation demonstrate it to have been an impossibility 
for them to have subsisted there. That narrative, there- 
fore, cannot be true and cannot be credited." 

This difficulty, we may observe at the outset, is of 
no weight so far as supplies for the human population 
were concerned; their wants were met largely by 
miraculous provision — water was brought for them from 
the flinty rock ; innumerable flocks of quail were made 
to alight once and again around their camp ; and they 
were furnished with manna from heaven throughout 
their journey, even until the day they ate of the new 
corn in Canaan. The difficulty concerns the flocks and 



GEOLOGY. 565 

herds only. They went out of Egypt, we are told, "with 
very much cattle." Now, whatever the number of these 
might have been when they started, for aught that ap- 
pears to the contrary in the history, they might have 
diminished rapidly as they advanced on their journey; 
indeed, no mention is made of the people possessing any 
considerable numbers in the latter portion of their pil- 
grimage, until an enormous booty was captured from the 
Midianites, as related in Numbers, chap. xxxi. v. 32, 33. 

To the foregoing consideration we may add the fact, 
that there have been ample evidences brought to light, 
within the past few years, to prove that this wilderness 
was anciently very much more productive than it is at 
present, and that it was quite capable of furnishing pas- 
turage to great herds and flocks. The explorations of 
H. B. Tristram, of F. W. Holland, of " The Ordnance 
Survey Expedition" in 1868-1869, and of Professor 
E. H. Palmer in 1869-1870, have placed this fact be- 
yond a doubt ; and not only that, but have also traced 
such a connection between the features, the scenery, the 
distances and the localities of this desert, and those 
named and described in the sacred history, as affords a 
convincing confirmation of its correctness and credibility. 

To see the full bearing of these recent scientific inves- 
tigations upon the difficulty under consideration, and so 
meet it the more satisfactorily, it will be necessary to 
describe the physical character of this region somewhat 
in detail. 

The Red Sea, running up from the Indian Ocean be- 
tween the continents of Africa and Asia, at its northern 



566 GEOLOGY, 

extremity divides into two branches, which diverge at 
an angle of about 50°; that to the west is the gulf of 
Suez, and that to the east the gulf of Akabah. These, 
with the escarpment of the Tih, like a curving mountain 
chain connecting their extremities, embrace a triangular 
peninsula. The sides of this triangle measure 190 and 
130 miles respectively, and the length of its base is 
about 150 miles. Within these bounds is embraced an 
area of some 11,600 square miles — this is the " Wilder- 
ness of Sinai." 

Along the base, or immediately south of the Tih 
frontier, a belt of sandstone country crosses the penin- 
sula nearly from one shore to the other. " The hills of 
this district are for the most part low and isolated, with 
broad plateaux for their summits; but the fantastic 
shapes and gorgeous coloring of the rocks more than 
compensate for the deficiency in height; and some of 
the sandstone peaks, such as Umm Rijlain, are among 
the most striking features in the peninsula. Broad, 
undulating plains, and narrow valleys with sheer pre- 
cipitous sides, are among the most conspicuous features 
of this belt of country. This formation is rich in min- 
eral wealth, containing many veins of iron, copper, and 
turquoise. 

"The east and west sides of the peninsula are bordered 
by strips of comparatively level desert; that on the 
eastern side wholly disappears here and there, when the 
mountains come down in sharp escarpments to the sea ; 
on the western side it grows gradually larger as it runs 
southward, and obtains its maximum breadth at Tor. 




507 



568 GEOLOGY. 

Here it is a broad undulating plain of gravel, which, as 
the largest unbroken expanse in the country, is called 
emphatically El Gaah, or The Plain. Its monotonous 
level is only broken by a low range of hills skirting the 
shore, and two small conical hills in its centre." * 

With no exceptions of note save the above, the whole 
of the Peninsula of Sinai consists of a cluster of bold 
granite peaks, rent and furrowed by innumerable ravines 
and gorges and wadys. Few countries, if any, on the 
face of the globe, exhibit so wild an aspect; the moun- 
tains appear heaped together in utter confusion when 
viewed from the summit of some surmounting eminence. 
" I have stood on the summit of the great Etna," says 
Mr. Stephens, "and looked over the clouds floating 
beneath it; upon the bold scenery of Sicily, and the 
distant mountains of Calabria; upon the top of Vesuvius, 
and looked down upon the waves of lava, and the ruined 
and half-covered cities at its base ; but they are nothing 
compared with the terrific solitudes and bleak majesty of 
Sinai." Another traveller, Dean Stanley, who recently 
visited this region, says, " The portentous appearances 
are such as give the impression that you are indeed 
travelling in the very focus of creative power." 

The bright red granite, which forms the mass of this 
mountainous district, in many places, is intersected with 
porphyry and greenstone. Though granite and porphyry 
are both of igneous origin, yet they are not the produc- 
tions of ordinary volcanic agency. The visible symbols 



* Talmer's Desert of the Exodus, pp. 29, 30. 



GEOLOGY. 5Q9 

of the glory and majesty described by Moses, as attending 
the giving of the Law, could not have been, therefore, as 
ignorant scepticism has sometimes insinuated, the heav- 
ing and smoke and eruption of a volcano, for there is 
no certain indication anywhere that such a thing as a 
volcano ever existed on this peninsula. "What has 
been taken, by unpractised eyes, as evidences of volcanic 
action, are only the detritus of iron in the sandstone 
formation. Whatever traces of igneous action may ap- 
pear on the granite rocks belong to their first upheaving, 
not to any subsequent convulsions. Everywhere there 
are signs of the action of water, nowhere of fire." * Not 
a trace of basalt, lava, or other products of volcanic 
agency has been met with in the whole Peninsula. 

The mountain peaks, which form the granitic kernel 
of this whole region, are divided into three groups, each 
with a central summit — the northwestern cluster, of 
which the most notable peak is Mount Serbal; the 
central cluster, whose highest point is Mount St. Cath- 
erine ; and the southeastern cluster, the crowning sum- 
mit of which is Um Shonisr. 

Um Shomer, on account of its distance and difficult 
ascent, remained until comparatively recent times but 
imperfectly explored. It was visited by but few, and 
ascended, we believe, by none, until Burckhardt made 
the attempt ; and even this adventurous traveller came 
short of its summit by some two hundred feet. Captains 
Wilson and Palmer of the Ordnance Survey, however, 



* Stanley's Sinai and Palestine, p. 23. 



570 * GEOLOGY. 

stood upon its very apex. Its sides are steep and rugged, 
its top is white, and its surroundings are those of utter 
desolation and solitude ; the silence that prevails around 
it is even oppressive ; yet this profound and awful still- 
ness is sometimes broken by mysterious noises, which 
Burckhardt describes as the sound of artillery, the pre- 
cise cause of which he failed to ascertain — probably 
produced by falling rocks, or gliding fragments, among 
its echoing precipices. The highest peak of Um Shomer 
reaches an altitude of 8500 feet above the sea. 

Tlie central cluster is divided by two deep and nearly 
parallel valleys into three distinct ridges, known by the 
Arabic names Jebel Humr, Jebel Musa, and Jebel ed 
Deir. The last, the eastern of the three, like all the 
rest, is a vast pile of steep and rugged granite, but 
inferior in elevation, and in the view it commands, to 
all the other principal mountains. Jebel Humr is the 
western range, and from the southern end of this springs 
its loftiest peak, Mount St. Catherine, 8526 feet above 
the level of the sea. This peak is largely composed of 
porphyry. It is a sublime Tower, and magnificent is 
the view from its summit, which embraces not only the 
labyrinth of bare granite peaks and deep dark ravines 
all around, but a panorama of the whole peninsula — the 
majestic Serbal on the one hand, and the towering cone 
of Um Shomer on the other, and both the gulfs of the 
Red Sea, beautifully blue, with the high mountains of 
Egypt and Arabia respectively beyond. 

In this group, and between Jebel ed Deir and Jebel 
Humr, lies Jebel Musa, or the Mount of Moses. This 



I 



GEOLOGY. 57^ 

range is some three miles long, and about one mile in 
breadth. It is an isolated mass, being cut off from the 
other mountains on three sides by deep wadys or valleys, 
and partially on the fourth or south side by two smaller 
valleys. On it are three prominent points that demand 
special notice. Near the southern extremity is the Jebel 
Musa or Mount of Moses, 7359 feet high. About the 
middle is Mount Horeb, of lesser elevation. And, at its 
northern end is Ras Sufsafeh,* a bold headland sur- 
mounted by two peaks, which abruptly and almost per- 
pendicularly terminates the range. Curving along the 
foot of this stupendous promontory is the wide valley of 
Rahah, presenting an open and even space, two miles 
long, and half a mile wide, gently sloping down to the 
very base of the mountain. From the southern side 
of this natural and magnificent amphitheatre, the two 
peaks of Ras Sufsafeh rise precipitously to the height of 
2000 feet, " standing out in lonely grandeur against the 
sky, like a huge altar." On this plain, and at the foot 
of this high altar, both ancient tradition and modern 
research have fixed the scene of the thousands of Israel 
assembled to receive the Law at the mouth of God. The 
members of the Ordnance Survey Expedition were unani- 
mous in this conviction. " No place could be conceived 
more suitable," says F. W. Holland, one of their number, 
" for the assembling of such a multitude of people both 



* The three summits— Mount Moses, Mount Horeb, and Ras Sufsafeh 
— though they have distinct names, are one and the same mountain 
mass, which in Scripture is sometimes called Sinai, and sometimes 
Horeb. 



572 GEOLOGY. 

to witness the thunderings and lightnings and the cloud 
upon the mountain, and to hear the voice of the Lord 
God when he spake to them." * 

The third and northwestern cluster of mountain peaks 
in this peninsula is that of Jebel Serbal. In massive 
ruggedness and in boldness of figure and outline, this 
presents an aspect of grandeur unrivalled among all the 
peaks of Sinai, and of which Dean Stanley gives the 
following graphic description : " It is a vast mass of 
peaks, which, in most points of view, may be reduced 
to five. These five peaks, all of granite, rise so precipi- 
tously, so column-like, from the broken ground which 
forms the root of the mountain, as at first sight to 
appear inaccessible. But they are divided by steep 
ravines, filled with fragments of broken and fallen 
granite. The highest peak is a huge block of granite," 
6734 feet above the level of the sea, " on this, as on the 
back of some petrified tortoise, you stand and overlook 
the whole peninsula of Sinai. Every feature of the 
extraordinary conformation lies before you; the wadys 
coursing and winding in every direction ; the infinite 
number of mountains like a model ; their colors all as 
clearly displayed as in Kussegger's geological map ; the 
dark granite, the brown sandstone, the yellow desert, 
the dots of vegetation along the Wady Feiran, and the 
one green spot of the Palm Grove of Eephidim. While 
descending, night came on ; it was a beautiful sight to 
see on our way the mountains lit up from top to bottom 



* Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 411. 



GEOLOGY. 573 

with the red blaze which shot up from the watchfires of 
the Bedouin tents. So they must have shone before the 
Pillar of Fire." * 

Jebel Serbal, being the most majestic mountain in the 
peninsula, has often contended both in ancient and 
modern times for the distinction of being " The Mountain 
of the Law," but the investigations of the late Ordnance 
Survey Expedition have extinguished its pretensions, 
and proved Has Sufsafeh to stand unrivalled in its 
claims to that honor. 

The wadys that divide and wind among the moun- 
tains of Sinai are in general dry valleys. Of these some 
are narrow and enclosed by lofty and perpendicular 
rocks, like that of Rephidim, now named Wady Aleyat ; 
some are favorable for travelling and encampment, like 
Wady Feiran ; while many of them are the channels of 
occasional torrents, and a wilderness of boulders, which 
render them impassable to man or beast. Wadys have 
been not inaptly called dry rivers. 

The great want of this whole country is water; rain 
falls comparatively seldom ; yet heavy showers do some- 
times occur, and on such occasions, in consequence of 
the barren and rocky character of all the mountains, the 
rain immediately runs down, and flows together from 
their impervious sides, as it does from the roofs of houses, 
thus producing sudden and often destructive torrents. 
Rev. F. W. Holland, in the winter of 1867, was an eye- 
witness of one notable such occurrence. I was encamped 



* Sinai and Palestine, pp. 71, 73. 

I 



574 GEOLOGY. 

in Wady Feiran, says he, near the base of Jebel Serbal, 
when a tremendous thunder storm burst upon us. After 
a little more than an hours rain, the water rose so 
rapidly in the previously dry wady that I had to run for 
my life, and with great difficulty succeeded in saving my 
tents and my goods ; my boots, which I had not time to 
pick up, being washed away. In less than two hours a 
dry desert wady, upward of 300 yards wide, was turned 
into a foaming torrent from eight to ten feet deep, roar- 
ing and tearing down, and bearing everything before it 
— tangled masses of tamarisks, hundreds of beautiful 
palm-trees, scores of sheep and goats, camels and 
donkeys, and even men, women, and children; for a 
whole encampment of Arabs was washed away a few 
miles above me. The storm commenced at five o'clock 
in the evening ; and at half-past nine the waters were 
rapidly subsiding, and it was evident that the flood had 
spent its force. In the morning a gently-flowing stream, 
but a few yards broad, and a few inches deep, was 
all that remained of it. But the whole bed of the 
valley was changed. Here, great heaps of boulders were 
piled up, where hollows had been the day before ; there, 
holes had taken the place of banks covered with trees. 
Two miles of tamarisk-wood which was situated above 
the palm-groves had been completely washed away, and 
upward of a thousand palm trees swept down to the sea. 
The change was so great that I could not have believed 
it possible, in so short a time, had I not witnessed it 
with my own eyes/' * 



* Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 425. 



GEOLOGY. 575 

The mountains of the Sinaitic group are composed of 
the same material from base to summit — granite, mostly 
bright red granite ; this is often intersected, however, 
with veins of greenstone, and especially porphyry. There 
is, indeed, what may be called a porphyritic dyke, which 
runs from northeast to southwest across the entire mass 
of mountains. As we leave the great elevations of 
Sinai, and proceed northward, its exclusive granitic 
character is gradually lost; large masses of porphyry 
occur; this presently becomes mixed with greenstone, 
and toward the northwest gives place to syenite. As the 
syenite and the porphyry run into each other by imper- 
ceptible transitions, it is to be inferred that they are of 
a contemporaneous origin. 

Advancing still northward, we presently come to the 
sandstone belt before described ; this flanks the entire 
northern frontier of the Sinai mountains. It is, however, 
a comparatively narrow belt, but runs, curving toward 
the north, clear across the whole peninsula. Within the 
limits of this belt only is sand, to any depth, to be found 
in the whole wilderness. Both the sand and the sand- 
stone rock, like the granite, are of a reddish hue, which 
gives a peculiar richness to the landscape when sur- 
veyed from a distance. 

This sandstone district is remarkable for the extensive 
turquoise mines which were worked by the ancient 
Egyptians in the neighborhood of Wady Mugharah and 
Serabit el Khadim. Here still remain numerous hiero- 
glyphic tablets, recording the names and titles of the 
kings under whose auspices they were worked, together 



GEOLOGY. 577 

with other archaeological relics of the highest interest 
and antiquity. Hamite iron, magnese, and copper ores, 
also appear to have been worked in this sandstone 
district; but the largest workings of copper discovered 
have been in the granite near Wady Senned, about eight 
miles northeast of Jebel Musa. Here a vein of ore, 
which crops up to the surface, has been worked almost 
continuously for a distance of nearly two miles. Traces 
of copper smelting have also been found in the valleys 
of Shellal, Nasb, Mugharah, Senned, and on the coast of 
the Gulf of Akabah. Far to the northwest, in the 
Yalley Gharundel, slags from copper smelting have like- 
wise been observed. Iron ore was probably worked at 
Jebel Hadid (Iron Mountain), about ten miles southeast 
of Jebel Musa. Thus smelting operations have been 
carried on over a large area of the peninsula, and we 
have historic evidence that some of these mines were 
worked by the Egyptians long before the Israelites 
marched through the wilderness. — From all this we can 
readily understand, what has been a mystery to many, 
whence that people in their wanderings might have 
obtained the metallic materials necessary for the manu- 
facture of their arms and tools, and to construct the 
holy tabernacle with its vessels and utensils. 

As we advance northward across the sandstone belt, our 
course is a gradual descent till we reach its limit, where 
rises sharply above it, like a mountain's side, the edge or 
outcrop of the great limestone bed, which overlies the 
sandstone, and constitutes the Badiet et Tih, or " Desert 
of the Wanderings." This escarpment in some places 
37 



578 GEOLOGY. 

rises to the height of 4000 feet, and from below has 
all the appearance of a mountain; it begins far 
northwest, and appears opposite the Gulf of Suez, but 
at the distance of some ten or fifteen miles from it, 
where it is called the Mountains of Eahah ; from thence 
it continues in a southeasterly direction, gradually 
departing from the gulf through an extent of some 
seventy miles ; it now turns and takes an easterly course 
under the name of the Mountains of Tih; again it 
curves and runs in a northeasterly course, keeping to the 
west of Wady Arabah as far north as the parallel of 
Mount Hor. Thus this bold and remarkable bluff, 
which constitutes the southern line of the desert of Tih, 
describes a complete semi-circle. Mounting this from 
the south, we at once stand on the vast Table Land of 
Tih, which has an average elevation above the sea level 
of about 2500 feet. Its general aspect is that of feature- 
less hills of blanched desolation. 

This limestone Table Land, Badiet et Tih, extends 
from the sandstone flank of Sinai, on the south, all the 
way to the borders of Canaan, on the north ; and from 
the frontier of Egypt, on the west, to the Valley of the 
Arabah, on the east ; and thus covers more than three- 
fourths of the whole of Arabia Petrea. It was mainly in 
and along the eastern borders of this desert land that 
the Israelites spent the last thirty-eight years of their 
wanderings. 

Let us now return to the Peninsula, or the Desert of 
Sinai proper, within whose borders the children of Israel 
passed the first fifteen months after leaving Egypt, and 



GEOLOGY. 579 

where the question of Subsistence presents its greatest 
difficulty. 

This tract of country, as we have just seen, has now 
been thoroughly explored — has, indeed, been accurately 
surveyed and mapped. Professor E. H. Palmer, who 
accompanied the Ordnance Survey Expedition, spent 
nearly a whole year in this work. During that time 
he travelled on foot, as the Hebrews must mainly have 
done, the whole region of their exodus and wanderings 
—traced every wady along which their herds and flocks 
must have grazed, examined nearly every spring and 
pool and rivulet whence they could have drunk, and 
ascended every eminence upon which Moses and Aaron 
could have stood. The result of all has been a gratify- 
ing confirmation of the accuracy and truthfulness of the 
Mosaic history. 

"Although the general aspect of the country," says 
Professor Palmer, " is one of sheer desolation and barren- 
ness, it must not be supposed that there is no fertility 
to be found there. There are no rivers, yet many a 
pleasant rivulet fringed with verdure may be met with 
here and there, especially in the romantic glens of the 
granite district. At Wadies Nasb and Gharandel are 
perennial, though not continuous, streams, and large 
tracts of vegetation. At that part of Wady Feiran 
where the valley contracts in breadth and concentrates 
the moisture, we find the most considerable oasis in the 
Peninsula; and behind the little sea-port of Tor, also, 
where a depression in the great alluvial plain of El Gaah 
collects the moisture, there exists a large and magnificent 
grove of date-palms. 



580 GEOLOGY. 

" Besides these, the more fertile spots produce thorns, 
acacia, tamarisk, sidr, and other trees, while most of 
the valleys contain some vegetation ; in the highlands, 
myrrh, thyme, and other fragrant herbs; and in the 
plains, broom, mallow, and countless plants on which 
the camels feed. Even the barest and most stony hill- 
side is seldom entirely destitute of vegetation ; and the 
Jericho rose, an extraordinary bibulous plant, which has 
the faculty of expanding when placed in water after 
lying in a cabinet for years, may be seen on the most un- 
promising spots. Many of the less frequented wadys, too, 
especially those which run down from the great granite 
clusters of mountains, are watered by pleasant streams, 
and teem with natural vegetation. The old monkish 
colonists of the place availed themselves extensively of 
the advantages afforded by these spots to plant gardens 
and olive-groves, many of which remain to the present 
day." * 

In Professor Palmer s interesting book we meet, 
throughout, with such touches of description as the 
following: "Well watered" — "a beautiful gorge filled 
with palms and tamarisks, and a clear bright stream 
running in its bed" — "We came presently to the wady 
where the tall graceful palm-trees afforded a delicious 
shade, fresh water ran at our feet, and, above all, bullnih 
flitted from branch to branch, uttering their sweet notes" 
— "A large and comparatively fertile tract" — "a lovely 
valley through which ran a clear cool stream bordered 



* Desert of the Exodus, pp. S3, 34. 



GEOLOGY. 

by a grove of palm-trees " — "A grove of palm-trees lining 
the main bed of the valley, and a gentle stream flowing 
past their stems added greatly to the beauty of the 
scene" — "From this we descended into a lovely glen, 
between precipitous cliffs, and paved with smooth white 
granite; along this there flowed a murmuring stream, 
which ever and anon, as it trickled over some larger 
rocks, formed itself into a deep pool or tiny waterfall, 
overshadowed by fantastic rocks, and graced with ferns 
and desert herbage of the richest green" — "Tall wavy 
rushes, with feathery heads, grew to the height of 
twelve or fourteen feet, at intervals along the way" — 
etc., etc. From such descriptions as these it is very 
evident, that the Wilderness of Sinai is not so destitute 
of either vegetation or water as it has often been repre- 
sented by those anxious to find difficulties or to create 
doubts, as to the credibility of the Bible history. 

The Rev. F. W. Holland, Fellow of the Royal Geo- 
graphical Society, who travelled this Desert Country in 
1867, and again as a member of the Ordnance Survey 
Expedition in 1869, made the following statements in 
an interesting paper read before that Society : " The 
lower portion of Wady Ghurundel is one of the most 
fertile in the whole peninsula. It is nearly three hun- 
dred yards broad in many places, and thickets of tamar- 
isks, palms and beds of bulrushes and reeds abound, and 
wild ducks, with many kinds of smaller birds, frequent 
the pools, formed here and there by a clear stream of 
running water, which never fails. . . . Water is not 
nearly so scarce in the granitic district as most travellers 



582 GEOLOGY. 

havo supposed. There is also a far greater amount of 
vegetation than usually described. The basins on the 
summits of the mountains generally afford good pas- 
turage, and even the mountain sides, which look so 
barren from the wadys below, are often covered with 
numerous plants on which the goats delight to feed. 
Many of the smaller wadys, too, are astonishingly 
fertile, and in former days, when fairly cultivated by 
the monks, must have yielded abundance of fruit, 
vegetables, and even corn, for I found traces in several 
spots of terraced plots evidently laid out for growing 
corn. ... In Wady Ilak alone, in addition to a fine 
grove of olives near the ruins of an old monastery, there 
is for three miles a constant succession of gardens, each 
garden having in it two good wells which never fail, 
and producing olives, pears, apples, vines, figs, palms, 
nebk, oarroub, apricot, mulberry, pomegranate, and 
poplar trees ; while above and below these gardens runs 
a stream of water which affords here and there a pool 
large and deep enough to swim in." 

The foregoing facts, in the opinion of the authorities 
who give them, offer abundant proof that the natural 
resources of the Wilderness of Sinai, at the present day, 
are capable of supporting a very considerable population. 

But this is not all. The investigations of the Ord- 
nance Survey Expedition have served to establish the 
further truth, that anciently, or at the date of the 
Exodus, this region must have been capable of support- 
ing a far larger population than at present. The evi- 
dence is clear and conclusive, that since that period this 



GEOLOGY. 533 

region has undergone a change very much for the worse. 
At present, timber of any kind is scarce, indeed a single 
large tree (excepting palm and tamarisk) is a notable 
'object ; but the time has been when the peninsula was 
well wooded. This fact is evinced by the remains of 
great mining operations, once carried on here ; again and 
again the explorers came upon vast heaps of " slag," the 
refuse of great smelting works, long ages since aban- 
doned. These heaps of slag imply a former abundance 
of fuel, and this fuel could have been nothing else than 
the wood growing in their neighborhoods, for this was 
the only supply that could be obtained. The summits 
of the mountains then as now were doubtless bare, but 
their sides and the valleys between them must have 
been clothed with forests. In carrying on these smelt- 
ing operations, vast quantities of wood must have been 
consumed; for, as is well known, a single furnace in a 
short period will eat up the forest for miles around it. 
The destruction of the forests in this peninsula for this 
purpose commenced at a very early period, in the second 
Egyptian dynasty it is said, a period long anterior to 
the Exodus of the Hebrews ; and the destruction went on 
for many centuries after that event — went on probably 
till the country was clean despoiled of its timber, and the 
mines had to be abandoned for lack of fuel. 

Now forests play an important part in the economy 
of Nature; and their destruction in a mountainous 
country, such as this, is invariably followed by two 
evils — one to the soil, the other to the climate. 

While the steep sides of mountains are covered with 



584 GEOLOGY. 

trees, their intertwining roots serve to hold and retain 
the soil there, against the action of heavy showers or 
sudden floods, and cause a large amount of the rain that 
falls to percolate slowly and beneficently through it 
toward the lower parts ; but destroy these forests and 
you destroy the bonds that hold together and hold in 
place the soil, and a process of denudation commences, 
which, in time, will inevitably leave those hill-sides bare 
rocks. In this very way many of the hills of Palestine, 
and various portions of the Alps, are known to have 
been reduced to hopeless barrenness. And this, without 
doubt, is what has been going on for ages in various 
parts of the peninsula of Sinai. 

Forests, also, have much to do in deciding the amount 
of rain that shall fall on a district of country. The cool 
foliage of extended forests condenses the atmospheric 
moisture, which would otherwise pass on with the aerial 
currents. Nothing in physical geography is better estab- 
lished than that the destruction of forests, in any region, 
diminishes the amount of rain-fall, and that fertility 
depends upon this. It has been the destruction of the 
forests, more than any other one cause, that has within 
a few centuries transformed those countries of Africa 
along the Mediterranean Sea, once the granary of the 
Roman Empire, into mere unproductive deserts. 

Now, this twofold evil, denudation of soil and diminu- 
tion of rain, has undoubtedly followed the destruction of 
the forests of Sinai ; and hence we can readily under- 
stand how that in the course of a period of more than 
3000 years the general character of that region must 



GEOLOGY. 585 

have been changed, so that its present condition gives 
but an inadequate idea of what it once was. We have 
sufficient reason to believe, therefore, that at the period 
when the Israelites spent their fifteen or eighteen 
months in this peninsula, the capacity of the country to 
support both men and beasts must have been far greater 
than it is now found to be. Indeed, the Report of the 
Ordnance Survey Expedition goes to show that at all 
the localities where the Mosaic History places the 
Hebrews in this Wilderness, there is no reason to doubt 
that the physical resources of those localities, so far as 
identified, were abundantly sufficient to justify all that 
is related of them. The alleged physical impossibility 
of the Israelites and their flocks and herds finding the 
means of subsistence during their stay in this wilderness 
we consider, therefore, as having been at length fully dis- 
proved. And it is equally wonderful and gratifying to 
observe how the apparent difficulties, which so long 
beset the Sacred Narrative, have thus melted away as 
our acquaintance with the country has become thorough 
and complete. 

The explorations of this Expedition have served not 
simply to refute sceptical objections, but also to furnish 
much positive confirmation of the Bible History. The gen- 
eral route of the Israelites has been traced out, and not 
a few of their halting-places clearly identified. In many 
countries it would be impossible to fix upon one road to 
the exclusion of all others ; but owing to the peculiar for- 
mation of this region, the explorers were enabled to 
decide with no little certainty the whole course taken 



58-6 GEOLOGY. 

from Egypt to Sinai. The scene of Miriam's " song of 
triumph over Pharaoh and his hosts," the "Wilderness 
of Shur," the line of " the three days' journey without 
water," the bitter springs of "Marah," the sweet "wells of 
Elim, with their palm-trees," the " encampment by the 
Sea," the " Wilderness of Sin," the defile of " Rephidim," 
the way followed to "pitch in the wilderness of Sinai,"" 
and the mount from which God proclaimed his holy Law — 
all these were identified, and were found to accord exactly 
with the simple and concise account given in the Bible. 

" We are thus able," says Professor Palmer, " not only 
to trace out a route by which the children of Israel 
could have journeyed, but also to show its identity with 
that so concisely but geographically laid down in the 
Pentateuch. We have seen, moreover, that it leads to a 
mountain answering in every respect to the description 
of the Mountain of the Law ; the chain of topographical 
evidence is complete, and the maps and sections may 
henceforth be confidently left to tell their own tale." * 

" Not a single member of the expedition," says Mr. 
Holland, "returned home without feeling more firmly 
convinced than ever of the truth of that sacred his- 
tory which he found illustrated and confirmed by the 
natural features of the desert. The mountains and 
valleys, the very rocks, barren and sunscorched as they 
now are, seem to furnish evidences, which none who 
behold them can gainsay, that this was that * great and 
terrible wilderness' through which Moses, under God's 
direction, led His people." f 



* Desert of the Exodus, p. 228. f Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 429. 



Physical Geography 

AND 

The Land of Promise. 



There is no district on the face of the globe containing so many and such 
sudden transitions as Palestine, being at once a Land of mountains, plains, and 
valleys. It unites different climates under the same sky, and collects within a 
small compass the pleasures and productions which nature has elsewhere dis- 
persed at great distances of time and place. — Volney. 

587 



Canaan a Land chosen of God : Western Palestine : Eastern Pales- 
tine : Valley of the Jordan : The Dead Sea : Reasons for the 
choice of this land — i. its isolation; 2. suitableness of its 
physical structure to educate the chosen people; 3. its fitness 
to be the Birth-place of the Bible; 4. Its central position, as 
to the three continents. 

588 



Physical Geography 



AND 

The Land of Promise. 



ANKIND having for the second time all 
but universally corrupted their way, in 
departing from the True and Living God, 
it became necessary, if the knowledge 
and worship of Him were to be preserved 
in the world, to resort to a different and 
more effectual method than had hitherto 
been followed for this end. The plan now adopted by 
the Most High, as observed in a previous chapter, was 
to choose a Man, and in him his descendants after him 
as a nation, to be His witnesses upon the earth — to be 
the depositaries of the historic and preceptive truths 
already made known, and of the prophetic truths and 
promises yet to be accomplished in the coming and 
Kingdom of Messiah. The person on whom this choice 
fell was Abraham, the son of Terah, whose native place 
was Ur, of the Chaldees. 

" Now the Lord said unto Abraham, Get thee out of 

589 




590 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy father s 
house, unto a land that I will show thee : and I will 
make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and 
make thy name great ; and thou shalt be a blessing : and 
I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that 
curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth 
be blessed. So Abraham departed as the Lord spake 
unto him ; and Lot went with him : and Abraham was 
seventy and five years old when he departed out of 
Haran. And Abraham took Sarai his wife, and Lot his 
brother's son, and all their substance that they had gath- 
ered, and the souls they had gotten in Haran ; and they 
went forth to go into the Land of Canaan, and into the 
Land of Canaan they came. And the Lord appeared unto 
Abraham, -and said, Unto thy seed will I give this Land." * 
From this passage of sacred history, it plainly appears 
that God himself made choice, not only of the family 
that should become the depositaries of his truth, but also 
of the Land in which they should dwell. The place 
of their habitation, no less than their office of sacred 
trust, was of Divine appointment. "Get thee into a land 
that / will show thee — Unto thy seed will I give this 
Land." Canaan, therefore, became the abode of the 
seed of Abraham, not by his choice or their valor, but by 
the express appointment of God ; He chose their inher- 
itance for them — pointed out to them this country as the 
Land He had of old prepared for them, and promised in 
the fulness of time to put them in possession of it. This 



* Genesis xii., 1-7. 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 59 1 

fact underlies the whole Scripture history of this people ; 
and any attempt to disprove or deny it is an attempt to 
sap the foundations of that sacred record. 

The enemies of the Holy Book know this, and have 
not been slow to make such attempts. To them Abra- 
ham is but a Chaldean adventurer, and his " call " but 
the dream of fanaticism or the pretence of imposture. 
And they can see in his descendants, the people that 
were led by the cloudy pillar in the day and by the 
column of fire in the night through "the great and 
terrible wilderness " to take possession of that Promised 
Land, nothing more than a predatory horde, invading 
the territories of tribes less powerful than themselves, 
and by deeds of violence and blood robbing them of their 
flocks and herds and rightful homes. They scoff at the 
idea that God either made choice of the Land, or prom- 
ised or gave it to them. If the Lord, say they, had been 
disposed to select a country for a favorite people, he 
could readily have found a hundred others in all respects 
infinitely more desirable than the little isolated and rocky 
territory of the Canaanites. They can see nothing in the 
situation or character of that country to determine or to 
indicate such a Divine choice. They therefore deny it. 

While it is not for us to enter into the counsels of the 
Almighty, nor to pronounce on all the ends secured by 
the steps He takes, yet, many times, when his plans 
have been carried out, and his work completed, we may 
be able to discern something of the wisdom of his course 
and of the beneficence of the results attained. This is 
true of the subject now before us ; and we shall under- 



592 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

take in this chapter to show that the Land of Canaan, 
by its geographical position, by the peculiarity of its 
environments, by its remarkable contour and consequent 
diversity of soil and temperature, was preeminently 
adapted for the home of God's peculiar people, and for 
the carrying out through them of his gracious purposes 
toward the whole human family. To do this will require 
us to present a concise view of the Physical Geography 
of this Land and its surrounding region. 

Western Palestine. 

The Mediterranean Sea, at its eastern extremity, 
terminates in a straight shore line of some 400 miles 
extent, and running nearly in a north and south direc- 
tion. Along the southern half of this shore lies the 
Promised Land, or Canaan or Palestine, as it is now com- 
monly designated. Its length runs in the same direction 
as the shore, and is 140 miles; and its breadth, including 
the territories of Reuben, Gad, and the half of Manasseh, 
which lay to the east of the Jordan, measures about 60 
miles. Nearly parallel to the coast, and at the average 
distance of 40 miles from it, the river Jordan, as the 
main artery of the country, flows from north to south 
through its entire length. 

From the borders of Asia Minor there run southward, 
parallel to the Mediterranean shore and to one another, 
two ranges of mountains, both celebrated in ancient 
history. Of these, the western, after passing through 
numerous elevations and depressions, at length gathers 
in its strength, and lifts itself high and steep to form the 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 593 

famous chain of Lebanon, which comes down to the 
northern frontiers of Palestine. Lebanon attains its 
greatest elevation in Jebel Mukhmel, 10,200 feet above 
the level of the sea, and capped with all but perpetual 
snow. The view from the height of this " Tower of 
Lebanon " is one of the most magnificent on the face of 
the globe, extending from Cyprus in " the midst of the 
great and wide sea" on the west, far toward the glowing 
and radiant horizon of the Persian Gulf on the east. 
Immediately around are seen an endless confusion of 
precipitous hills, deep green glens, winding valleys, and 
rushing streams. Here are all the features of beauty 
and sublimity that can adorn a landscape — walled rocks, 
hanging trees, leaping waterfalls, and terrific precipices, 
threatening in their aspect and desolating in their fall. 
" I have travelled in no part of the world," says Van de 
Yelde, "where I have seen such a variety of glorious 
mountain scenes within so narrow a compass. Not the 
luxurious Java, not the richly wooded Borneo, not the 
majestic Sumatra or Celebes, not the paradise-like Ceylon 
are to be compared to the southern mountains of Leb- 
anon. Here the traveller finds all he could desire to 
behold on this earth." 

South of Jebel Mukhmel, deep within the recesses of 
the mountain chain, and beneath its glittering crest of 
ice and snow, was the ancient forest of cedars, famous for 
supplying the fine timber that entered into the construc- 
tion of Solomon's Temple at Jerusalem. 

After advancing some thirty miles farther south, 

Lebanon forms another grand peak, Jebel Sunnin, 8550 
38 



594 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

feet high. From this the range gently declines, increas- 
ing in breadth as it diminishes in height, till it is 
suddenly cut in twain by a tremendous gulf, rivalling in 
depth and grandeur the famed canons of the Eocky 
Mountains. The river Leontes (now Litany) after 
flowing for more than a hundred miles in a southerly 
direction along the eastern flank of Lebanon, takes a 
turn westward, forcing its way across through the heart 
of the mountain declivity ; the cleft is very narrow, and 
the rocks rise perpendicularly on either side, sometimes 
to the height of ten or twelve hundred feet. The 
stream, like a furious monster chained at the bottom of 
the sunless chasm, writhes and roars; at this point 
whitened with foam, and at that hidden from view by 
overhanging trees, whose branches meet and intertwine. 
At length it escapes from its rocky prison into the Plain 
of Phenicia, through which it passes with a gentler flow, 
and finally discharges its waters into the sea, a little 
above Tyre. 

This enormous cleft of the Leontes forms the north- 
ern boundary of the Land of Israel. Southward from 
this the Lebanon Bange spreads itself more diffusely, 
forming by its many offshoots the uneven but fertile and 
beautiful district of Northern Galilee, where "Asher 
dipped his foot in oil," and Naphtali, like a spreading 
terebinth, "put out goodly boughs." About the par- 
allel of Nazareth, the general surface slopes and sinks 
into the rich expanse of Jezreel, now called the Plain of 
Esdraelon, on the northern verge of which stands the 
dome-like Tabor, the witness and memorial of many 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 595 

historic scenes of interest and importance. Through 
this plain westward flows the river Kishon, which, after 
collecting the waters of numerous minor streams, rushes 
against the side of Mount Carmel, where it is fifteen 
hundred feet high, whence it is deflected in a north- 
westerly direction to discharge itself into the Bay of 
Acre. 

South of Esdraelon, the range starts up again, and 
after throwing westward the bold ridge of Carmel, rises 
into the hilly province of Samaria, with Jezreel on its 
northern slope, while Little Hermon and Mount Gilboa 
continue the chain to Bethshean, overlooking the deep 




Profile of Palestine, North to South. 



Valley of the Jordan. Southward still, in a laby- 
rinth of irregular hills and eminences, rocky dells and 
narrow valleys, with here and there a rich vale or green 
spot, the mountain range continues past Jerusalem, past 
Bethlehem, and even down to Hebron. Beyond this, 
the general surface of the country sinks into a wide 
region with broad shallow valleys and slight elevations, 
destitute of trees, almost waterless and unsuited for cul- 
tivation. 

This hilly range from Esdraelon to Hebron, which 
may be regarded as the back-bone of the country, reaches 



596 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, 

in its higher elevations an average of some 2500 feet 
above the level of the sea. Gerizhn is 2675 feet; 
Jerusalem, 2600 feet; Mount of Olives, 2725 feet; Beth- 
lehem, 2700 feet; and Hebron, 3030 feet above the sea. 
From several of these summits remarkably extended 
and clear views of the surrounding country may be 
obtained. 

The mass of hills which thus runs along and occupies 
the centre of the country is bordered by low and level 
lands on both sides. On the west this low border forms 
successively the rich maritime plains of Acre, Sharon 
and Philistia, which range from ten to sixteen miles in 





Profile Across— Jaffa to Moab. 

width. On the east, the hill region descends more 
abruptly into the profound Valley of the Jordan, which, 
from the Lake of Galilee down to the neighborhood of 
Jericho, has an average breadth of some six or seven 
miles, and from thence to the Dead Sea of about twelve 
miles. Through these alluvial lands various little 
streams course their way from the hills, to the river on 
the one hand, or to the sea on the other. 

The present condition and appearance of the largest 
portion of Western Palestine, the region we have now 
surveyed, is bare, sterile and forbidding. Often not a 
grove, not a tree, not a cultivated spot, nor a human 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 597 

habitation is to be seen within the compass of miles. 
Vast tracts are apparently incapable of cultivation, 
being covered with small gray stones ; while many of the 
rounded hill-sides exhibit little else than denuded rocks. 
The contemplation of the barren and cheerless scene 
fails not to suggest the question, " Can these stony hills, 
these deserted valleys, be indeed the Land of Promise, 
the land flowing with milk and honey?" But we are 
not to judge of the appearance, or of the resources, of 
this land in ancient days by what we see of it in our 
own. It is now, and long has been, a country fallen, 
ruined, blighted. The wars, the anarchy, the oppression, 
and the barbarism of numerous and successive centuries, 
have completely changed the whole face of the country. 
Those naked and stony ridges were once waving wood- 
lands ; we read of the forest of Hamath and of the Wood 
of Ziph, within the borders of what is now hare Judea ; 
Kirjath-Jearim was "a city of forests;" and even on the 
naked hills of Benjamin there was the Forest of Bethel, 
the haunt of the bear and the covert of the lion.' Those 
rising slopes, now little more than naked rocks, were in 
former days terraced and overspread with ample soil, 
hanging with olives and clustering with grapes. And 
in those localities, now dreary and deserted, the pastures 
were once clothed with flocks, the valleys also were 
covered over with corn, while the happy population 
shouted for joy, they also sang. 

In proof of all this, abundant evidence still remains, 
not only in the statements of Scripture and the testi- 
mony of profane history, but also in the vestiges of ruined 



598 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

greatness which are strewn over the face of the whole 
land. The ruins of villages, or fortresses, or cities, which 
cover nearly all the hill-tops of the country, attest the 
greatness of both the population and productiveness of 
the land in former ages. From Dan to Beersheba, and 
from the Eiver to the Sea, old foundations, prostrate 
walls, broken cisterns, crumbling terraces, the sites of 
oil and wine presses, ruined sheep-folds, crumbling watch- 
towers, dry conduits, etc., remain as silent witnesses of 
the numerous flocks, rich vintages, and abundant har- 
vests which once supported busy millions, where now 
but here and there a traveller is seen. 

We are not, however, to conceive of the country as 
being altogether an unmitigated desert, even at the 
present day ; it still retains in many localities sufficient 
richness to vindicate its ancient claims to be " a land of 
wheat and barley, and vines and fig-trees, a land of wine 
and oil and honey." In the Yale of Escliol and on the 
heights of Urtds are now produced the finest grapes in 
the world, whilst the environs of Hebron, Bethlehem, and 
Jerusalem can boast of the richest fig and almond and 
olive groves in all the East. The Valley of the Jordan 
is rich in soil and tropical in climate; the plains of 
Jericho, now as of old, by proper tillage might be made 
" as the garden of the Lord." The undulating expanse 
of Sharon, for many miles, is a vast and beautiful garden, 
producing the most delicious oranges, lemons, plums, 
apricots, bananas, etc. The Plain of Philistia, one might 
say, is one enormous grainfield, yielding prodigious crops 
of wheat, rye, barley, etc., from year to year, and from 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 599 

century to century, without manure, without irrigation, 
and without any of the appliances of modern agriculture. 
Shechem is described by Dean Stanley as " the widest 
and most beautiful of the plains of the Ephraimite moun- 
tains — one mass of corn, unbroken by boundary or hedge 
— from the midst of which start up olive-trees, them- 
selves unenclosed as the fields in which they stand : on 
the western side opens a valley, green with grass, gray 
with olives, gardens sloping down on each side, fresh 
springs running down in all directions; at the end, a 
white town embosomed in all this verdure, lodged be- 
tween the two high mountains, which extend on each 
side of the valley — that on the south Gerizim, and that 
on the north Ebal — this is the aspect of Nablous (ancient 
Shechem), the most beautiful spot in central Palestine." 
Farther north still is the famed Plain of Esclraelon, 
twelve miles broad, and stretching almost from the 
Mediterranean to the Jordan, the aspect of which in 
springtime is said to be that of " a vast waving corn- 
field," through which flow the several streams whose 
waters unite to form the river Kishon. " Every trav- 
eller has remarked on the richness of its soil — the exu- 
berance of its crops. Here the Palm once more appears, 
waving its stately tresses over the village enclosures. 
The very weeds are a sign of what in better hands this 
vast plain might become." Galilee may be called a fine 
district of country ; the northern portion of it is beauti- 
fully wooded with dwarf oak, intermixed with tangled 
shrubberies of hawthorn and arbutus; the whole is 
varied by fertile upland plains, green forest glades, and 



(300 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

wild picturesque glens, and is still the home of a numer- 
ous and industrious population. 

Such are the dimensions, the outlines, and the main 
physical features of Western Palestine. We now cross 
over to take a similar survey of 

Eastern Palestine. 

We take our starting point from Anti-Lebanon, the 
eastern of the two mountain ranges coming down from 
the north, mentioned at the beginning of this descrip- 
tion. This is generally somewhat inferior in height to 
Lebanon, and from which it is divided by the fine and 
fertile valley of Coele-Syria, the Tetrarchate of Abilene. 
This chain attains its greatest altitude in the majestic 
Hermon, whose summit stands 9800 feet above the level 
of the sea. " While Lebanon is wooded or clothed with 
verdure to within one thousand feet of its summit, Her- 
mon and its cluster of satellites are for the most part 
bare, excepting in the thin threads of verdure which 
mark the course of the streams which drain them, and 
the forest does not climb more than a few hundred feet 
up the mountain side." It is, however, a noble dome ; 
from its top one can look down upon the whole Land 
of Palestine, almost as upon an extended map. On the 
other hand, the snowy crown of this mountain is clearly 
visible from the Plain of Phenicia, from Bashan, from 
Judea, and even from the bed of the Dead Sea. And 
whencesoever its icy crest is seen, in summer, when the 
firmament around it seems to be on fire, it presents an 
object of indescribable grandeur. 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. gQl 

To the east and southeast of Hermon extends the 
rugged region of Trachonitis, which is unmarked by any 
special elevations in the form of hills, but is furrowed 
by innumerable and fantastic ravines, apparently of 
volcanic origin. Its whole aspect is exceedingly dreary. 

From Hermon southward the mountain range con- 
tinues its course to the east of the Jordan, and parallel 
to it, rising successively to the historic heights of Ajlun, 
Gilead and Moab, which, with their intervening connec- 
tions, bound, like a solid purple wall, the whole eastern 
horizon. The pine-clad summit of Ajlun stands 6500 
feet above the sea ; that of Mount Gilead a little less. 
Of the Moab division of the range, Mount Nebo (of which 
Pisgah is a peak) forms the highest point, being 4600 
feet. From Moab the chain continues southward, till it 
culminates in Mount Hor, whose elevation is a little 
over 5000 feet. From this point it declines in height, 
but preserves its continuity along the eastern side of the 
valley of the Arabah until it reaches the Elanitic Gulf. 

Of this trans-Jordanic region, H. B. Tristram, who 
visited it a few years since, gives the following account : 
"Although the mountain range is quite as high as the 
hills of Western Palestine, it is not so broken up. Only 
four streams of any size furrow it: the Yarmuk, the 
Jabbok, the Callirhoe, and the Arnon. To the east the 
hills gently melt away into the immense red plain 
which reaches the Hauran or Bashan, the farthest pos- 
session of Manasseh, after the hills of which, the Assy- 
rian Desert begins. In the north we find an open plain 
eastward, extending to the Lejah (Trachonitis), and 



602 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

farther Bashan, and westward the range is dotted with 
noble oaks, rather park-like than in the form of dense 
forest, deciduous in the lower grounds, and evergreen 
on the higher ranges. Among these roam the flocks 
and herds of the wandering Bedouin. 

" Next, in Gilead, we come to a more densely-wooded 
region, a true forest in places, the tops of the higher 
range covered with noble pines; then a zone of ever- 
green oaks, with arbutus, myrtle, and other shrubs 
intermixed; lower down, the deciduous oak is the pre- 
dominant tree, mixed with wild olive, and many other 
semi-tropical trees, which, in their turn, yield, as we 
descend into the Jordan valley, to the jujube, the ole- 
aster, and the palm. But in all these forests are open 
glades and dells, where corn is grown or olives planted, 
and the streams are fringed with oleander. Such 
must have been the appearance of the neighborhood of 
Shechem and Bethel in the days of the patriarchs. 

" Farther south, the regions of Ammon and Moab are, 
for the most part, without forest, the trees being princi- 
pally terebinth, scattered here and there over a region 
of fine turf, well watered, and still covered with flocks, 
till we reach the eastern corn-plains of the Belka, now 
the richest district of Syria. This country, almost in 
its primitive state, is a picture of what southern Judea 
and the neighborhood of Beersheba once were, before 
the denudation of the forests had checked the annual 
rain-fall. There is a beauty in Gilead, a richness in 
Moab, and a grandeur in Bashan, which make it hard 
to believe that only the narrow cleft of the J ordan valley 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. gQ3 

separates them from the gray hills and naked rocks of 
Western Palestine." 

Valley of the Jordan. 

Between the two parallel ranges of mountains now 
described, or between East and West Palestine, flows 
the River J ordan, whose channel forms one of the most 
remarkable features, not only of this country, but of the 
whole face of the globe. Great interest has been felt 
from remote antiquity in regard to the source of this 
river, and this honor has been claimed for three different 
streams — the Great Jordan, the Lesser Jordan, and the 
Hasbany ; all of these rise in the slopes or rocky sides 
of Anti-Lebanon, and all meet and mingle their waters 
in Lake Merom, now Lake Huleh. The Greater Jordan 
has its origin in a copious fountain that gushes out of a 
rock behind the modern town of Banias, and its entire 
length from thence to the lake does not exceed twelve 
miles. The Lesser Jordan also has its beginning in a 
spring, which forms a magnificent basin of three hundred 
feet in diameter, entirely surrounded by shapeless basaltic 
stones; in the midst of this capacious bowl the water 
boils and bubbles up in great abundance, sending forth 
a full-grown stream, thirty feet wide and two feet deep ; 
its whole length, however, is only some five or six miles ; 
it is in fact but a branch of the Greater Jordan. Far up 
in the mountains, near the village of Hasbeiyah, another 
beautiful fountain bursts out at the foot of a rocky preci- 
pice, in a most romantic and delightful spot, and forms 
at once the perennial stream of the Hasbany. The 



604 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

course of this river lies west of the other two ; it is much 
longer than either of them, the distance from its source 
to the lake being twenty-five miles. Hence the claim 
of the Hasbany to be the true parent of the sacred river 
of Palestine rests upon its greater length, whilst that of 
the Lesser Jordan is based upon its larger volume of 
water, and of the Greater Jordan on its having received 
the title and retained the honor from remotest antiquity. 

Lake Huleh, in which the waters of these contending 
streams are collected, is situated in a marshy region, 
not far from Csesarea-Philippi. Its length, as lately 
measured by Lieutenant S. Anderson, R. E., is about 
four miles, and its width three miles. Its dimensions 
at certain seasons are considerably larger. Its surface 
stands nearly on a level with that of the Mediterranean. 

Out of this lake, the Jordan passes through a narrow 
channel between precipitous banks; and, true to the 
signification of its name, " The Descender," it descends 
in almost continuous rapids for some eight miles ; and 
after a gentler flow of some three miles more, enters into 
another lake — the beautiful Sea of Galilee. Than this 
lake, excepting the Holy City, there is no place in 
Palestine invested with deeper or more sacred interest 
to the Christian ; everything connected with it, there- 
fore, is carefully and seriously inquired into. 

This sea, whose bosom and environments were the 
scene of most of the Saviour's miracles and teachings, 
has been pictured in the minds of most readers of the 
Gospel, but often quite erroneously. In shape, it is 
somewhat like a pear, with the broad end north. Its 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 605 

extreme length is thirteen miles, and its greatest width 
seven miles. Its surface level is 650 feet below that of 
the Mediterranean. Its surroundings have nothing of a 
Swiss or Alpine character. " There are here no pine- 
clad hills rising from the very edge of the lake ; no bold 
headlands break the outline of the shores ; and no lofty 
precipices throw their shadow over its waters; but it 
has, nevertheless, a beauty of its own, which always 
makes it remarkable. The hills, except at Khan Minyeh, 
where there is a small cliff, are recessed from the shore 
of the lake, or rise gradually from it ; they are of no 
great elevation, and their outline, especially on the 
eastern side, is not broken by any prominent peak. 
Everywhere from the southern shore the snow-capped 
peak of Hermon is visible, standing out so sharp and 
clear in the bright sky that it appears almost within 
reach. 

" The shore line, for the most part regular, is broken 
on the north into a series of little bays of exquisite 
beauty; nowhere more beautiful than at Gennesareth, 
where the beaches, pearly white with myriads of minute 
shells, are on one side washed by the limpid waters of 
the lake, and on the other shut in by a fringe of olean- 
ders, which in the month of May add the charms of 
their red and bright blossoms to the beauty of the 
scene." 

Encompassed, as this sheet of water is, with rocky 
and fissured mountains, its shores abound in springs, 
some of which are sweet, some are brackish, some are 
sulphurous, and some are quite warm. About a mile 



606 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

south of modern Tiberias, there are no less than seven 
distinct springs, varying in temperature from 132° to 
142° Fahr. A strong smell of sulphur rises from the 
water, and as it flows down to the lake it encrusts the 
stones and rocks with a green deposit. 

From the southern end of the Sea of Galilee the 
Jordan emerges a pure and bright stream, to enter upon 
the third and last stage of its course. The valley, in 
prospect below, is broad and verdant, stretching away 
toward the south, covered in the immediate neighbor- 
hood of the lake with luxuriant grass. On the east side, 
palm trees here and there wave their graceful tops ; the 
oleander everywhere fringes both the river and the 
streamlets that flow into it; and at different points, 
tamarisks of peculiar species, and many other trees 
unknown in the rest of Palestine, crowd the banks. 

Lieutenant W. F. Lynch, of the United States Navy, 
who descended the Jordan in 1847, found its course, 
though generally of moderate rapidity, yet interrupted 
frequently by descents that amounted almost to cascades. 
His boats plunged down no less than twenty-seven 
threatening rapids, besides a number of lesser note. Its 
channel is also remarkably tortuous ; although the direct 
distance between the Lake of Galilee and the Dead Sea 
does not exceed sixty miles, yet its waters, to accomplish 
this, travel full two hundred miles. While its immediate 
banks, in many places, are beautified by trees and rich 
vegetation, and enlivened by the songs of various birds, 
the more remote cliffs and hill-sides present, for the 
most part, a wild and cheerless aspect. 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. (507 

When down about a third of the distance between the 
two seas the American commander gives the following 
lively description of the scenery : " For hours in their 
swift descent the boats floated down in silence — the 
silence of the wilderness. Here and there were spots 
of solemn beauty. The numerous birds sang with a 
music strange and manifold ; the willow branches were 
spread upon the stream like tresses, and weeping mosses 
and clambering weeds, with a multitude of white and 
silvery little flowers, looked out from among them ; and 
the cliff swallow wheeled over the falls, or went at his 
own will, darting through the arched vistas, shadowed 
and shaped by the meeting of the foliage on the banks ; 
and above all, yet attuned to all, was the music of the 
river, gushing with a sound like that of shawms and 
cymbals. There was little variety in the scenery of the 
river ; to-day the stream sometimes washed the bases of 
the sandy hills, at other times meandered between low 
banks generally fringed with trees, and fragrant with 
blossoms. Some points presented views exceedingly 
picturesque — the mad rushing of a mountain torrent, the 
song and sight of birds, the overhanging foliage and 
glimpse of the mountains far over the plain, and here 
and there a gurgling rivulet pouring its tribute of crystal 
water into the now muddy Jordan; the western shore 
was peculiar from the high calcareous limestone hills, 
which form a barrier to the stream when swollen by the 
efflux of the Sea of Galilee during the winter and early 
spring ; while the left and eastern bank was low and 
fringed with tamarisk and willow, and occasionally a 



608 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

thicket of lofty cane, and tangled masses of shrubs and 
creeping plants, gave it the appearance of a jungle."* 

Below Wady Ajlun, or about midway between the 
Lakes, the same explorer tells us that " the mountains 
toward the west rise abruptly in naked pyramidal crags ; 
each scar and fissure appearing as palpably distinct as 
though within reach, and yet are hours away; the 
laminations of their strata resembling the leaves of some 
gigantic volume, wherein is written by the hand of God 
the history of the changes He has wrought.'* 

As the river approaches the end of its career, the 
banks become low, and the country flat and level, over- 
spread with willows and sedges and tall grass. Shoals 
and sandbanks now often obstruct the channel, and the 
current moves more and more slowly. At its mouth, 
and even some distance before, its waters are salt and 
acrid, and the dried mud and stones along its verge 
everywhere are incrusted with deposits of the same 
character. At the point of disemboguement it is 540 
feet wide, and three feet deep, as measured by Lieu- 
tenant Lynch. Thus this remarkable and sacred stream, 
after travelling hundreds of miles, and winding through 
a thousand graceful mazes amid scenes of life and soli- 
tude, barrenness and beauty, at length reaches its dismal 
termination — The Dead Sea. 

Sunk as the valley of the Jordan is in this its lowest 
division, not only below the general surface of the 
country, but a thousand feet below the level of the sea, 



* Narrative of TJ. S. Expedition, p. 212. 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

its climate is in summer exceedingly hot; and even in 
winter, snow and frost are here unknown. 

The Dead Sea. 

The whole valley of the Jordan is a vast and deep 
trench, dug far down into the crust of the earth, and 
growing deeper and deeper as it advances toward the 
south, until in the basin of the Dead Sea it reaches its 
lowest depth. Here, therefore, are collected and held 
in a profound and mysterious reservoir the waters of 
that celebrated stream. This collection of water is a 
great salt lake, forty-two miles long, and from twelve to 
sixteen miles wide. Its form is somewhat irregular, 
being penetrated two-thirds across, at the southeast 
quarter, by a point of land, called the peninsula of 
Lisan. In the southern part the water generally is not 
more than ten or twelve feet deep, while a considerable 
extent is^ much less ; at one point it is even fordable. 
At the north end it is much deeper; here the depth 
ranges from 700 feet to 1100 feet, and at one point- 
reaches the profundity of 1308 feet. (See the sectional 
views on the next page.) But the most marvellous 
thing about this sea is the fact that its surface, accord- 
ing to the accurate measurement of Lieutenant Symonds, 
of the English service, is 1312 feet below the level of 
the Mediterranean. Hence the bed of this lake is the 
deepest depression known on the face of any continent 
of the globe, being 2620 feet below the sea level. The 
descent from the summit of the Mount of Olives to the 
Ford of Jordan, near its mouth, is not less than 4000 feet, 

39 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 61 1 

The Dead Sea is closely hemmed in on the east and west 
sides by lofty mountains that rise precipitously from its 
water's edge. Around the mouth of the river there is 
considerable marshy ground ; proceeding down along the 
western shore this soon gives place to a rocky beach and 
to rugged cliffs ; in about eight or ten miles we come to 
the mouth of the Brook Kidron, a deep gorge, narrow at 
the bottom, but yawning wide at the top. The sides of 
this frightful ravine, where it opens upon the lake, rise to 
the height of more than 1000 feet; the bed for a good part 
of the year is perfectly dry, all the water being absorbed 
in the sand long before it reaches the sea. As we 
advance south, we pass numerous caves, some opening 
into the face of the rock far up the mountain's side, in 
positions wholly inaccessible. The shores are generally 
barren and desolate, and the mountains are of a dark 
brown hue,* appearing as if they had been scorched. 
Here and there, however, little valleys open which pro- 
duce a scanty vegetation, where a few birds and some 
other little animals may be occasionally seen. Proceed- 
ing still south, we again observe the openings of numer- 
ous caves far up in the face of the precipices. When 
half way down the shore we come to an opening, or 
recess, some half a mile wide, sloping gently to the edge 
of the water — this is the Plain of Engedi, which is more 
or less tilled by a few Arabs. The stones and pebbles 
on the beach are covered with saline incrustations, and 
appear from a distance as if white-washed. Immediately 
behind this little plain the rocky mountain towers in 
dark and awful ruggedness, of which Dr. Kobinson gives 



612 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

an interesting account. He set out for the Dead Sea from 
Hebron, and, travelling due east, reached at length the 
rocky and wild region of Engedi — David's hiding-place 
from the deadly hate of Saul. He found it full of caves, 
and the whole scenery corresponding in every respect 
with the sacred narrative. As he advanced, the general 
face of the country descended, his road lying along rough 
and winding ravines. At length, having, as he supposed, 
reached the sea level, he came out suddenly upon the 
brow of a mountain, from which he beheld to his great 
surprise a broad expanse of water some 1500 feet still 
below the point on which he stood — it was the Dead Sea. 
From his position, the northern portion of the sea was 
hidden by a projecting cliff, but he could look down and 
survey the whole of the southern half of it, its outlines 
and islets and peninsula. After remaining here about 
three-quarters of an hour, he and his party resumed 
their journey to go down to the shore. " The descent 
was frightful, the pathway having been formed by zigzags 
down the sides of the precipice, the necessary width of 
the track having been obtained by sometimes cutting 
into the face of the rock and sometimes by means of 
rude walls built from below. As they looked back up 
the rocks after they had descended, it seemed to them 
impossible that any road could have been formed there 
— and yet so skilfully had the work been planned and 
executed, that the descent, though terrific, was accom- 
plished without serious difficulty. One of Robinsons 
companions had crossed the heights of Lebanon and the 
mountains of Persia, and he himself had travelled all 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 61 3 

the principal passes of the Alps, but neither of them had 
met with a pass so difficult and dangerous as this." 

Leaving Engedi, and following the shore, we come 
at the distance of about a dozen miles to a phenomenon 
of a different interest from anything we have yet wit- 
nessed. West of the southern extremity of the sea, and 
running nearly parallel with the shore, is Jebel Usdum ; 
this is an extended and prominent ridge of rock salt, 
about seven miles long, and from one and a half to three 
miles wide, and varying from 150 to 200 feet in height. 
It is capped along its jagged top with a mass of gypsum 
and marl. Along the sides of this hill, in several places, 
the pure mass of salt breaks out in extended white 
streaks, or forms perpendicular precipices forty or fifty 
feet high, and several hundred feet long; these. crystal- 
line cliffs, sparkling beneath a tropical sunshine, are very 
striking and beautiful spectacles. At certain points of 
the ridge, masses of salt, detached from heights above, 
have rolled down and are found lying thick along its 
base where, during storms, the waves wash and dissolve 
them, to add to the saltness of the lake ; at other points, 
little springs send forth their streams to percolate among 
the crags and fissures, and carry with them similar acces- 
sions to the briny deep. In one place, such a spring 
has washed out the saline rock, and formed a remarka- 
ble cavern, of irregular form and great extent. Its 
entrance is twelve feet high and its breadth about the 
same ; it pierces into the mountain a spacious tunnel 
for nearly 400 feet, and then branches off into two small 
fissures, which can be traced no farther. 



614 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

Similar excavations by drainage have been formed 
under the level beach. " In several places," says Tris- 
tram, " we found the ground hollow, and echoing under 
our feet as we walked by the shore ; and in some, the 
crust has given way, and a laden camel has suddenly 
disappeared from the file of a caravan, to be salted to 
death below/' 

At the head of a deep and narrow chasm, near the 
centre of this mountain of Usdum, Lieutenant Lynch 
discovered a remarkable formation of the salt rock, con- 
sisting of a round and lofty mass, standing out and 
nearly detached from the mountain, and presenting on 
one side the appearance of a tall column. It was, in fact, 
" a pillar of salt," over forty feet in height, capped with 
a layer of limestone. The mass, though appearing in 
front an isolated pillar, yet behind was connected with 
the precipice by a kind of buttress widening toward the 
base. This remarkable object stands upon a pedestal 
some fifty feet above the level of the lake. Josephus 
relates that the pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was 
transformed remained in his day, and that he had seen 
it. * It is not improbable that a distant view of this 
striking saline formation, aided by a superstitious imag- 
ination, supplied all the grounds he had for the bold 
assertion. 

Such is the western shore of the Dead Sea; and the 
mountains which rise from its eastern side are scarcely 
inferior in height, or ruggedness, or dread desolation. 



* Antiquities, Chap. XI., Sect. 4. 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 61 5 

Lieutenant Lynch and a part of his company, at the invi- 
tation of the Arab Chief of Kerak, ascended this range 
from a point nearly opposite Engedi. His road lay 
through a gorge of wild and awful grandeur. The path 
was steep and narrow and perilous; it literally over- 
hung a deep and yawning gulf, while to unmeasured 
heights above towered and projected masses of blackened 
rock threatening destruction at every instant by their 
impending aspect. The whole scene was one of thrilling 
grandeur and desolation. To add to the terrific sublimity 
of their situation, a fearful tempest of thunder and light- 
ning and rain swept over it as our adventurers were 
ascending ; and soon the bottom of the gorge was filled 
with a rushing and roaring torrent, which came down 
from the mountain tops, and swept onward with a vio- 
lence that nothing could resist. At length the party 
reached the brow of the. table-land, 3000 feet above the 
surface of the lake, and came under the walls of the town 
of Kerak. ' * > 

Looking down upon the Dead Sea from such an eleva- 
tion as ;th'is, its waters seem to rest heavily as in a vast 
caldron^, often covered with a leaden-colored mist ; while 
everything around it appears strange and unnatural, and 
the whole scene wears an expression of mysteriousness 
and indescribable desolation. Hence, through long ages, 
this whole region has been dreaded, and shunned as a 
place accursed of God. 

Around the sea are found numerous springs of divers 
qualities; some pour forth hot water, some sulphur 
water, and some that which is as strong brine. There are 



616 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 

also at different points wells of bitumen, large masses of 
which, especially after earthquakes, are seen floating 
upon its surface. Hence, altogether, the waters of this 
lake are salty and nauseous in the extreme. 

From the abounding impregnation of saline, bitumi- 
nous, and other matters, the water of the Dead Sea is 
much heavier than that of the Ocean, and is therefore 
remarkably buoyant. Common ocean water holds in 
solution four per cent, of solid salt, but that of this sea 
holds twenty-eight per cent. If the density of distilled 
water be indicated by 1, that of mid- Atlantic will be 
1.02, and that of the Dead Sea 1.13. Hence, Lieutenant 
Lynch found that his boats, with exactly the same 
burden, drew one inch less water when afloat on this lake 
than they did in the river Jordan. Neither man nor 
beast can sink in it, but will without effort float upon 
the surface like cork. Dr. Robinson tells us that he 
bathed in it, and though he had never learned to 
swim, he found that in this water he could sit, stand, 
lie or float in any position without difficulty. And 
Mr. Montague, somewhat more luxurious in his concep- 
tions, assures us that a man can sit with ease in its 
waters, and pick a chicken or read a newspaper at his 
pleasure. Objects seen through this water appear as if 
seen through oil. 

On a calm and hot day the sea sometimes assumes a 
peculiarly sombre aspect. "The great evaporation en- 
closes it in a thin transparent vapor, its purple tinge con- 
trasting strongly with the extraordinary color of the sea 
beneath, and where they blend in the distance, giving 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. g]7 

it the appearance of smoke from burning sulphur. It 
seems like a vast caldron of metal, fused but motion- 
less."^ In the night, also, the surface of the water, 
owing to its peculiar qualities, when ruffled, is one sheet 
of phosphorescent foam, and the waves, as they break 
upon the shore, throw a sepulchral light upon the near 
clifTs and scattered fragments of rock along the beach. 

No fish or trace of living thing has been discovered in 
this sea. Some of its water was brought home by the 
American Commander, which was subjected to examina- 
tion under a powerful microscope, but no animalcule 
or vestige of animal matter could be detected in it ; so 
that it has been rightly named — The Bead Sea. 

Such is the Land of Promise. The view now taken 
shows it to be a very remarkable country in its physical 
structure. It embraces within its limits all the great 
scenic features of the globe — plains and mountains and 
deserts, fruitful valleys and fearful gorges, the blue sea 
and tranquil lakes, gushing fountains and flowing 
streams. It enjoys all grades of climate that prevail 
from the equator to nearly the arctic circle. It pos- 
sesses every variety of soil, and is adapted for the growth 
of all kinds of grain, fruits and flowers; and in it nearly 
all classes of animated beings can find a congenial home. 
It holds within its compass the advantages, the produc- 
tions and the pleasures which Nature has elsewhere dis- 
persed over different territories, or divided among distant 
regions. In a word, Palestine is A world in miniature. 



* 77. S. Expedition, p. 324. 



618 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

We are now prepared to consider the objections of 
scepticism adverted to at the beginning of this chapter, 
and to point out some of the probable reasons why God 
selected this particular country for the home of his 
chosen people. 

A First reason may be noticed in the isolation of this 
land. We are expressly told that the Hebrews were to 
be u a peculiar people/' and to be " separate from the 
nations." " Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall 
not be reckoned among the nations." It was the purpose 
of God to keep the seed of Abraham, during their 
minority, or the period of their training and growth into 
a nation, a community by themselves; they were to 
" dwell alone," that they might be preserved as far as 
possible from imbibing the idolatrous notions, or follow- 
ing the corrupt practices of the nations about them. 
Now, it would be difficult to find a country, good and 
pleasant, on the face of the earth, more secluded from 
all others, and therefore more suitable for the Divine 
purpose, than Canaan. This land was literally shut out 
on all sides from the rest of the world. To the east lay 
the vast Assyrian Desert ; on the west was the long and 
almost harborless coast of the Mediterranean ; along 
the whole southern frontier stretched "the great and 
terrible Wilderness of Paran ; " while on the north it 
was protected by the stupendous ramparts of Lebanon 
and Hermon, which left but a narrow gateway open, 
the Valley of Coele- Syria, which lay between them. 
Thus in this land "the Vine of God's own planting" 
"was hedged round about," by sea and desert and 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

mountain, that neither "the boar of the wood," nor "the 
beast of the field " should harm it. 

A Second reason for the selection of Canaan may be 
seen in the fact, that the physical structure of the country 
presented a suitable frame-work or mould for enclosing 
and forming the national character to the will and pur- 
poses of God. The history of the world proves that the 
position, features, and climate of a country, in no small 
degree, determine both the pursuits and the character of 
its inhabitants. Of this the Greeks and the Romans in 
the past, and the Britons and New Englanders in the 
present, are notable examples. " The physical characters 
of a region," says Dr. McCosh, " the nature of its surface, 
whether flat or hilly, its soil and minerals, the size and 
flow of its rivers, the mountain chains which cross it, 
and the bays of the sea which indent it, the clearness or 
cloudiness of its atmosphere — all these have moulded to 
some extent the physical peculiarities of man, and 
determined his tastes, his pursuits and his destiny." * 
Hence when the Lord chose this peculiar territory for 
the inheritance of his people, He had an eye to some- 
thing more and something higher than mere means of 
subsistence ; He saw in it conditions that would quicken 
to industry, surroundings that would stimulate to obedi- 
ence, and scenes calculated to inspire devotion, and 
altogether, such as would help to mould the character 
and shape the history of his people after his own will. 
The fertile plains, the airy hills, the deep and heated 

* Typical Forms, p. 385. 



620 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

valley, the wide and blue sea, the towering mountains, 
the mysterious lake and the dreary desert — were all to be 
means 'of inspiring, soothing, awing, interesting, or elevat- 
ing their hearts and minds. The varied vegetation of 
the land — the cedar, the palm, the vine, the olive, the 
fig-tree, the rose and the lily, by the gracefulness of 
their forms, by the beauty of their tints, by the richness 
of their fruits or the luxuriance of their foliage, were 
likewise to contribute their pure and refining influence 
for the same end. It was with reference, not so much to 
their bodily wants as to the development of their mental 
faculties and the elevation of their moral and religious 
character, that this unique and secluded country was 
assigned to them for their home — a country in which 
the distant view of "the wilderness of their wanderings" 
would ever keep in memory their great deliverance — a 
country in which from every hill-top the sight of sur- 
rounding desert barrenness would serve to inspire them 
with gratitude for their happy lot — a country of which 
the blessings would be so evidently the gift of Heaven 
as to raise their thoughts perpetually to the Great Giver 
of all, and to bind them in grateful, holy allegiance to 
Himself through all generations. 

A Third reason for the choice of Canaan was its pre- 
eminent fitness to he the Birth- Land of the Bible — the 
unequalled variety of its scenery, climate and productions 
render it a most statable place for the penning of the Holy 
Scriptures in a style of expression, figures and illusti'ations 
fitted to interest and instruct the human race generally. 
It is true — most true, indeed — that those Scriptures were 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. (J21 

given by inspiration of God, yet as the truths they 
embodied were conveyed through human mediums and 
were addressed to human beings, they had of necessity 
to be clothed in terms they understood, and illustrated 
by figures and comparisons with which they were famil- 
iar. And no spot on the earth's surface could have 
been selected which could better have supplied the 
writers of a Book intended to instruct men of every 
latitude and climate, with images and illustrations fa- 
miliar, one or other of them, to the dwellers in every 
region of the globe. If the Sacred Volume had been 
written in Borneo or in Greenland, on the banks of the 
Ganges or of the Amazon, in the heart of Arabia or the 
heart of Africa, how widely separated it had been from 
the ideas, sympathies and interests of the great majority 
of the earth's inhabitants ; how limited a measure of 
their feelings or imaginations had been represented by it. 
The truths, indeed — the abstract truths — would have been 
the same ; but the forms in which they had been clothed 
would have been widely different, and the power they 
possessed to affect us would have been greatly weakened. 

But the Bible having been written where and as it has, 
we have in it scenes and similitudes, transactions and 
narratives, with which our own experience and observa- 
tion have so much in common, that they come directly 
home to every man's bosom, and to every man's business 
in life. We have the history of a pastoral people, of an 
agricultural people, of a trafficking and military people, in 
the several tribes at their various occupations as shep- 
herds, husbandmen, traders or warriors, according as 



622 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

they occupy the hill-country or the plain, the shore of 
the sea or the margin of the desert. We have scenes of 
land and ocean, the climate of the tropics and of the 
snow-clad mountains, the productions of India and of 
Europe. Hence the Holy Book, its parables and pre- 
dictions, its psalms and spiritual songs, designed to 
enlighten the minds, to comfort the hearts, and to ani- 
mate the souls of men in all regions of the world, 
embrace within their range the natural features and 
vicissitudes of almost every country. 

The devotion of the mariner and of maritime countries 
finds natural expression in the numerous allusions to the 
waves and roar and perils of the sea — " The great and 
wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both 
small and great beasts " — " He commandeth and raiseth 
the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof" — 
" Deep calleth unto deep ; all thy waves and thy billows 
are gone over me " — " He maketh the storm a calm, 
so that the waves thereof are still " — " He bringeth them 
unto their desired haven "—etc. 

The peaceful keepers of flocks and herds among the far 
inland glens and mountains also find the gratitude and 
joy that glow within their hearts expressed in hallowed 
songs abounding in references to the very objects that 
through life interest their minds, and to scenes that 
daily delight their hearts — " We are the people of his 
pasture, and the sheep of his hand " — "All we like sheep 
have gone astray " — " The Lord is my shepherd, I shall 
not want : He maketh me to lie down in green pastures ; 
he leadeth me beside the still waters" — " Though the 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 623 

flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the 
stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the 
God of my salvation" — etc. 

The diversified soil and recurring seasons of Ca- 
naan presented and suggested imagery to the sacred 
penmen, that have rendered nearly every operation of 
the husbandman vocal with Divine Truth — with memen- 
tos of man s dependence or evidences of God's bounty, 
with invitations to prayer or calls to duty. " He watereth 
the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it 
may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater" — 
" He causeth grass to grow for the cattle and herb for 
the service of man; and wine that maketh glad the heart 
of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread 
which strengtheneth man's heart" — " Thou waterest the 
ridges thereof abundantly ; thou settlest the furrows 
thereof ; thou makest it soft with showers ; thou blessest 
the springing thereof- thou crownest the year with thy 
goodness" — etc. 

J With these milder scenes and images, the chosen 
Inheritance offered also those of a more terrible char- 
acter, and such as at once meet the experience, touch the 
feelings and rouse the souls of those inhabiting the torrid 
regions of the globe — the earthquake, the volcano, and 
the hurricane. "He looketh on the earth and it trem- 
ble th" — "Hetoucheth the mountains and they smoke" 
— "He bowed the heavens and came down, and there 
was darkness under his feet" — "The Lord thundered out 
of heaven, and the Highest gave his voice, hailstones 
and coals of fire" — "The voice of the Lord divideth the 



624 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

flames of fire " — " The hills melted like wax at the pres- 
ence of the Lord" — etc. 

Nor did this wonderful land fail to supply images and 
experiences that come home to those whose lot is cast in 
the colder and more dreary parts of the earth. Embodied 
; n the songs of Zion we find the allusions : " Time of 
snow " — " Snow and vapors " — " Snow like wool " — 
"Hoar-frost like ashes"— " Ice-like morsels" — "Who 
can stand before his cold " — " Though your sins be as 
scarlet, they shall be white as snow" — " Wash me and I 
shall be whiter than snow" — etc. 

These examples are sufficient to show what fitness 
there was in the Land chosen of God, to be the theatre 
on which the history should be made, and the country 
in which the psalms and promises and predictions should 
be written, that were to be for the edification and com- 
fort of mankind in all ages and countries of the world. 

But above and beyond all, in the choice of this par- 
ticular country regard was had to one greater than 
patriarchs or prophets, even to the incarnate Son of 
God : nay, behind, and far behind all indication of choice, 
even in the Divine plan and preparation of this peculiar 
land, reference was had to His wondrous ministry of 
wisdom, love, and power among men; such materials were 
deposited for its formation at the bottom of the sea, and 
such forces were employed for its upheaval in hills and 
valleys as would constitute it a suitable field for the 
proclamation of his message of grace, for the exercise of 
his miraculous benevolence, and for laying Him down 
upon the altar of Divine Justice, a sacrifice for the sin 



PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. (305 

of the world. Had the Son of the Highest appeared 
among men in any other country, the Gospel History, in 
the character of the materials which compose it, would 
have been wholly different from what it is. Many of his 
most important instructions, as well as most wonderful 
works, grew out of the local peculiarities or conditions 
of the country. His miracles were called forth by the 
diseases of its climate, by the storms of its Wee, by the 
destitution of its desert, and by the dead buried in its 
caves. His teachings were throughout interwoven with 
the natural features and productions of the land ; His 
inimitable parables were read from its vineyards, its 
sown fields, its hid treasures, its tares, its fig trees, its 
drawn fish, its wandering sheep. In a word, Palestine, in 
its features and productions, was as closely connected 
with the ministry and death and burial of Christ, as are 
the warp and woof of a piece of tapestry with the varied 
forms and figures displayed upon it. 

A Fourth reason for making Canaan the home of his 
chosen people was its central position in regard to the 
inhabited parts of the earth. "I have set Jerusalem in 
the midst of the nations and countries that are round 
about her." As it was necessary to place the sun in the 
centre of the planetary system, that its light and heat 
might be diffused more readily and equably to all the 
members of that system — so it was expedient that the 
Seed of Abraham, the Depositaries of Divine Truth, 
should be planted, as it were, in the midst of the world, 
that the light of that truth might be the more readily 
disseminated among all nations. Looking at the map of 

40 



(526 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

the world, it will be seen that no district or country 
more central to the three great divisions of the Old 
World could have been chosen than Canaan. It forms 
as nearly as possible the point of junction between Asia, 
Europe, and Africa, into which, in the fulness of time, 
the light of the Gospel should flow, as the saving health 
of all nations. 

"We see, then, that Canaan was assigned to God's 
chosen people as their home and inheritance for reasons 
worthy the Divine wisdom, and for ends most gracious 
toward man. And we learn, hence, too, that God did 
but give to Abraham a glimpse of his long-formed and 
far-reaching plans toward our fallen race when He said 
to him, " Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the 
place where thou art northward, and southward, and 
eastward and westward; for all the land which thou 
seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever." 
Long before the Patriarch had thus looked around him 
from that eminence, yea, "while as yet the Lord had not 
made the world, nor the fields, nor the first clod of 
earth," His holy eye had looked down from the height 
of his sanctuary, and prospectively surveyed and divided 
the Land among his numerous posterity yet unborn. 
Already, in his prescient view, that division among the 
Tribes had been made, that holy Book had been written, 
that Mount Zion had been crowned with the sacred 
Temple, that Calvary had sustained the mysterious 
Cross of his beloved Son, and the tidings of his redeem- 
ing love had gone forth from Jerusalem among all 
nations. " Known unto God are all his works from the 
beginning." 



Topography 



AND 



The Gospel History. 



WJierever a story, a character, an event, a book, is involved in the conditions 
of a spot or scene still in existence, there is an element of fact ivhich no theory 
or interpretation can dissolve. — Stanley. 



627 




I. Connection and harmony of the Gospel Histories with localities, 

AS FOUND AND SEEN AT THIS DAY. 
II. THE CONNECTION AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE IMAGERIES OF THE GOS- 
PELS, AND THE FEATURES AND PRODUCTIONS OF THE COUNTRY. 

628 




Topography 

AND 

The Gospel History. 



HE great subject of the Gospel History is 
Jesus of Nazareth. In this wonderful Per- 
son we have a character that stands alone 
in all history. The life which He led was 
the most spotless, the morality which He 
taught was the most pure and elevated, 
and the death with which He crowned both 
was the most noble and sublime ever known on the 
earth. By the power of his example, and the purity of 
his doctrine, and the triumph of his death, He laid the 
foundation of a kingdom, which all the powers of dark- 
ness in earth and hell have not been able to move, and 
which to-day embraces the strength and commands the 
homage of the most civilized nations of the globe. 

Wonderful, indeed, is the character of Jesus. And 
hardly less wonderful is the manner in which it is por- 
trayed in the Gospel histories — written after no formal 
or studied plan, but as it were undesignedly, in brief 

629 




630 TOPOGRAPHY. 

and simple narratives of a variety of incidents, strung 
together with but slight regard even to their right order 
and connection, and yet yielding a result of unequal 
moral beauty and power — a portraiture original, con- 
sistent, symmetrical, perfect and lovely beyond all that 
poet or philosopher had ever conceived. 

These narratives of the Evangelists, breathing a spirit 
too unselfish and too pure for a fallen race, while they 
have compelled admiration in every age and land, have 
been assailed as no other writings ever have. No other 
records have passed through such an ordeal of criticism. 
Nothing that is embraced in them, nothing that is 
connected with them, has escaped the most searching 
scrutiny. And no means or method, that can well be 
conceived, has been left unemployed to oppose their 
influence, to disprove their claims, and to overthrow 
their authority. The resources of talent, learning, in- 
genuity and skill have been well-nigh exhausted in 
these efforts. The last, and perhaps most subtle and 
notable attempts of this character have been those of 
Strauss, in Germany, and Kenan, in France. Renan 
has exercised his ingenuity together with his brilliant 
and fascinating style to convince his readers that the 
Gospel History is but a legend, a mixture of some facts 
with a multitude of popular fancies, which, in the lapse 
of time, won for itself general acceptance as a true 
record. Strauss employed all the learning at his com- 
mand to place the Gospel History on a par with heathen 
myths, which had their birth in the dreams of super- 
stition, or the wild fancies of poets. According to this 



TOPOGRAPHY. go| 

mythic theory, " a religious consciousness of a peculiar 
character appeared in the first century, beginning at 
J udea ; and by the opening of the second century it had 
reached every province of the Roman World. This gave 
rise to myths; and these myths committed to writing 
are the Four Gospels and the Book of Acts, and some 
say the Epistles of Paul." 

Both these theories, the legendary and the mythic, 
like a hundred others before them, have proved misera- 
ble failures. The Gospel History, as is obvious to the 
most superficial reader, is neither cast in the form, nor 
dressed in the garb of a myth or legend. The first and 
the last impression which the perusal of it makes upon 
every fair-minded reader is that the writers were men 
of artless simplicity and honesty, relating what they 
had seen and heard. Their learning, their critical 
sagacity, or their worldly wisdom, may be questioned 
or even denied, but it is impossible to deny their good 
faith ; it shines forth from every chapter and every 
verse ; it is even strengthened by their few discrepances 
in minor details, while it is sealed by their own life- 
blood. 

Unlike the writers of myths and legends, and wholly 
unlike all impostors, the Evangelists do not attempt to 
picture out, or to embellish, or even to impart a shade 
of imaginative coloring to the scenes and transactions 
they relate. "They are," as Professor Schaff has justly 
observed, "the most objective of all historians; they 
abstain from every intrusion of their own feelings and 
reflections, even when they record the most exciting 



632 TOPOGRAPHY. 

scenes, the bitterest persecution and the deepest suffer- 
ings of their Master. Their individuality is lost in the 
events, which are supposed to speak best for themselves, 
without note or comment." 

Myths, legends, and impostures do not usually fix dates, 
nor attach themselves to precise localities ; they carefully 
eschew such particulars as dangerous, and prefer un- 
marked periods and undefined somewheres. But in the 
New Testament history throughout are found constant 
allusions to specific times and circumstances, to well- 
known cities and provinces, to kings and governors, 
to public officers and private persons, such as are the 
natural results of an actual and faithful and contem- 
porary history. The deeds and discourses which lie at 
the foundation of Christianity were not put forth in 
a cave, or done in a corner, but openly in the sight of 
friends and foes. The very spirit of the Gospel, active 
benevolence, prompting to journeys by land and to voy- 
ages by sea for the good of mankind, has served to 
connect it by a thousand links with the geography and 
history of those countries where its labors and sacrifices 
of love were enacted. In this way the sacred record 
is laid open to the most searching scrutiny as to its dates 
and distances and localities. And it is impossible for 
him who intelligently makes the comparison not to be 
struck by the constant agreement between the state- 
ments of Scripture History and the topography, climate, 
and productions of those regions as found at this day. 
And herein we have a class of evidences in confirmation 
of that history which can neither be gainsaid nor 



' TOPOGRAPHY. ^03 

resisted. "Facts," says Professor Stanley, "are stub- 
born, and geographical facts happily the most stubborn 
of all. We cannot wrest them to meet our views ; but 
neither can we refuse the conclusions they force upon 
us. It is by more than a figure of speech that natural 
scenes are said to have 6 witnessed ' the events which 
occurred in their presence. They are < witnesses ' which 
remain when the testimony of men and books has 
perished. They can be cross-examined with the alleged 
facts and narratives. If they cannot tell the whole 
truth, at any rate, so far as they have any voice at all, 
they tell nothing but the truth." 

Now it is a fact patent to all who have given atten- 
tion to the subject, that every successive examination 
and cross-examination to which the localities of Pales- 
tine have thus far been subjected, have served only to 
prove more and more conclusively, that the writers of 
the Gospels must have been citizens of that country, and 
must have been dwellers in it at the time of which they 
speak. The harmony between the simple statements 
and incidental allusions in their narratives and the 
present natural features of the land is striking and 
complete. 

Many of the discourses, parables and miracles related 
in the Gospels are so involved in the conditions, sur- 
roundings, or imagery of the localities where they trans- 
pired, and there remain of these enough so unaltered 
to the present day, that a glance at the real scenes 
carries conviction to the candid mind, that in those 
Gospels, he is reading, not myths nor legends, but real 



634 TOPOGRAPHY. 

histories, and that he is there following, not a phantom 
hero, but a real and living man, who trod the ground 
on which he stands, and looked upon the scene on which 
his eyes now gaze. 

In evidence of the correctness of the foregoing general 
remarks, we now request the reader's attention to two 
classes of specific facts. 

I. The close connection and entire harmony of the Gospel 
History with Known Localities. So remarkable is this, 
that more than one distinguished traveller has pro- 
nounced the Bible "the best hand-book or guide to 
Palestine." 

According to the Gospel narrative Jesus was born at 
Bethlehem, a town of the tribe of Judah. This town 
or village still remains, under the name Beit-lahm. It is 
situated, as of old, some half a dozen miles south of 
Jerusalem on a narrow hill ridge, with creeping vine- 
yards along its slopes, and corn-fields below, as in the 
days of Buth and Boaz, with the well a little distance 
from the gate as when David longed to quench his thirst 
therefrom, and the wild hills spreading eastward where 
the shepherd's flocks " who kept watch by night " may 
have wandered. The sight and the whole scene of this 
town are in perfect agreement with all w r e read of them 
in the sacred history ; there exists no doubt of its iden- 
tity, nor has there ever been a doubt. Justin Martyr, 
who wrote within Mty years after the death of the 
apostle John, mentions that the spot of the Nativity 
was well known, and pointed out to pious visitors in his 
day. And 180 years later, in commemoration of the 



TOPOGRAPHY. qo- 

event, the Emperor Constantine erected his magnificent 
Basilica, or Church of the Nativity, over what was then 
believed to be the very place ; that church, after passing 
through many and various vicissitudes, remains there to 
the present day, and is now the oldest monument of 
Christian architecture in the world. 

The evangelists record of Jesus, that the home where 
he grew from tender infancy to the ripeness of manhood 
was at Nazareth, in Galilee. And this place, like 
Bethlehem, has preserved his memory through all the 
centuries, and stands forth among those hills to-day, a 
visible witness for the reality of his person, and the 
truth of his history. It is situated among the south 
ridges of Lebanon, just before they sink down into the 
Plain of Esdraelon. Here runs, in a waving line, nearly 
east and west, a valley about a mile long, and, on an 
average, a quarter of a mile broad, but which at a certain 
point enlarges itself considerably so as to form a sort of 
basin. In this basin or enclosure, along the lower edge of 
the hill-side, lies the quiet, secluded village of Nazareth, 
in which the Saviour of men spent the greater part of his 
earthly existence. The surrounding hills vary in height, 
some of them reach an elevation of some four or five 
hundred feet. They have rounded tops, are composed 
of the glittering limestone which is so common in that 
country, and, though on the whole sterile and unattrac- 
tive in appearance, present not an unpleasing aspect, 
diversified as they are with the foliage of fig-tre es and 
wild shrubs, and with the verdure of occasional fields 
of grain. Our familiar hollyhock is one of the gay 



636 TOPOGRAPHY. 

flowers which grow wild there. The enclosed valley is 
peculiarly rich and well cultivated; it is filled with 
corn-fields, gardens, hedges of cactus, and clusters of 
fruit-bearing trees. Being so sheltered by hills, Naza- 
reth enjoys a mild atmosphere and climate. Hence all 
the fruits of the country — as pomegranates, oranges, 
figs, olives— ripen early, and attain a rare perfection. 

Two localities connected with Nazareth, though not 
directly related to our subject, yet are of an interest 
deserving of notice. One of these is " The Fountain of 
the Virgin," situated at the northeastern extremity of the 
town, where, according to tradition, the mother of Jesus 
received the angel's salutation (Luke i. 28). Though 
we may attach no importance to this latter belief, we 
must, on other accounts, regard the spring with feeling 
akin to that of religious veneration. It derives its 
name from the fact that Mary, during her life at Naza- 
reth, no doubt accompanied . by " the child Jesus," must 
have been accustomed to repair to this fountain of water, 
as is the practice of the women of that village at the 
present day. Certainly, as* Dr. Clarke observes, if there 
be a spot throughout the Holy Land that was undoubt- 
edly honored by her presence, we may consider this to 
have been the place ; because the situation of a copious 
spring is not liable to change, and because the custom 
of repairing thither to draw water has been continued 
among the female inhabitants of Nazareth from the 
earliest period of its history. The well-worn path which 
leads thither from the town has been trodden by the feet 
of a long, long chain of generations. — The other place is 



TOPOGRAPHY. G37 

the summit of the hill that rises immediately back of the 
town, which commands one of the grandest views in all 
the Land. In the north are seen the ridges of Lebanon, 
and, high above all, the white top of Hermon ; in the 
west, Carmel, glimpses of the Mediterranean, the bay 
and the town of Akka ; east and southeast are Gilead, 
Tabor, and Gilboa ; and south, the Plain of Esdraelon 
and the mountains of Samaria, with villages on every 
side, among which are Kana, Nein, Endor, and Taanach. 
It is unquestionably one of the most beautiful and sub- 
lime spectacles which the earth has to show. We may 
well believe that the Saviour, during the days of His 
seclusion in the adjacent valley, often resorted to this 
very spot to look abroad upon the glorious works of the 
Creator, which so lift the soul upward to Himself. One 
of the grandest views of Hermon is that which must 
have many a time burst upon Him as He ascended from 
the valley eastward on His way to Cana and Tiberias.* 

In this quiet and secluded village every statement 
and allusion of the Evangelists finds its clear and full 
confirmation. Its name, en-Nazirah, is the same as that 
given it in Matthew ii. 23. It is built on a hill-side, 
as described in Luke iv. 29. It is situated within the 
Province of Galilee, as stated in Mark i. 9. It is near 
to Cana, as intimated in John ii. 1, 2, 11. Behind and 
above it is a precipice, steep and forty feet high, cor- 
responding to that described in Luke iv. 29, to which 
his enraged fellow-townsmen led him, that they might 



*For some of the preceding facts and statements the writer is 
indebted to Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. 



638 TOPOGRAPHY. 

cast him down headlong to destroy him. Its site stands 
1750 feet higher than that of Capernaum by the Sea of 
Galilee, so that when he visited the latter place, as 
stated both in Luke iv. 31, and in John iv. 47, he 
literally " went down " to Capernaum. So correct and 
definite are the statements of the Gospel History; yet 
all these topographical facts are mentioned merely inci- 
dentally therein ; the correspondence, therefore, between 
the statements and the facts as found now existing, is 
all the more wonderful and convincing. — Shortly after 
the close of the third century, Helena, the mother of 
the emperor Constantine, built a church at Nazareth, 
and named it the Church of the Annunciation. In the 
time of the Crusaders, it was the Episcopal See of Beth- 
shean. At present there are there a Franciscan Con- 
vent, a Greek church, a Latin church, and a Protestant 
Missionary chapel. 

As Jesus approached the mature age of thirty years, 
the Gospel narrative states that, preparatory to entering 
upon his public ministry, he left Galilee and went down 
the valley of the Jordan, to receive Baptism at the 
hands of John, who was at that time exercising his 
ministry on the banks of that river. And here again 
we shall find every statement made or intimation given 
in perfect accordance with the scene as it exists at this 
day. It was in " the wilderness," the retired solitude 
of the deep valley of the river of Palestine. " On the 
banks of the rushing stream, as related in Matthew iii., 
the multitudes gathered — the priests and scribes from 
Jerusalem, down the pass of Adummim ; the publicans 



TOPOGRAPHY. ^ 

from Jericho on the south, and the Lake of Gennesareth 
on the north ; the soldiers on their way from Damascus 
to Petra, through the Ghor, in the war with the Arab 
chief Hareth ; the peasants from Galilee, with One from 
Nazareth, through the opening of the Plain of Esdraelon. 
The tall 6 reeds,' or canes in the jungle waved, 6 shaken 
by the wind;' the pebbles of the bare clay hills lay 
around, to which the Baptist pointed as capable of being 
transformed into 6 the children of Abraham;' at their 
feet rushed the refreshing stream of the never-failing 
river." * "And they were baptized of him in Jordan, 
confessing their sins. And Jesus, when He was baptized, 
went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the 
heavens were opened unto Him, and he saw the Spirit 
of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon Him : 
and, lo, a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved 
Son, in whom I am well pleased." 

" Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilder- 
ness to be Tempted of the devil." The wilderness here 
referred to was doubtless that on the other side of the 
river, for "John was baptizing beyond Jordan;" besides. 
He is described as being "led up by the Spirit" — up to 
the desert hills beyond; and He was there "with the 
wild beasts," that lurked in their undisturbed caves and 
thickets. On these elevations the shelving and shattered 
rocks ever and anon lay exposed — and the tempter, 
pointing Him to these in his long-continued fast, said, 
"If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones 



* Stanley's Sinai and Palestine, p. 307 



640 TOPOGRAPHY. 

be made bread." And the peculiarity of these lonely 
heights offered the evil one a ready facility to present 
his temptation in another form : " and the devil taketh 
him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showed 
him all the kingdoms of the world " (i. e. of the land) . 
From a high point on this eastern range, a little north 
of the Jabbok, a most extended prospect of the whole 
region of Canaan is presented, and which strikingly cor- 
responds with that here indicated. Lebanon, the Sea of 
Galilee, Esdraelon in its full extent, Carmel, the Medi- 
terranean, and the whole range of Judah and Ephraim 
are distinctly visible. E. H. Palmer pronounces it the 
finest view he ever saw in any part of the world. And 
Dean Stanley makes the statement, " This view — so 
multiplied and so beautiful — must have been the very 
prospect which presented itself to the eyes, first of Abra- 
ham and then of Jacob, as they descended from these 
summits on their way from Mesopotamia ; it must have 
been substantially the same as that which was unfolded 
before the eyes of Balaam and Moses. And it is in all 
probability the view which furnished the frame-work of 
the vision of all the kingdoms of the icorld, which was 
revealed in a moment of time to Him who was driven 
up from the valley below to these mountains at the 
opening of his public ministry." * 

Not many months after his mysterious temptation we 
find Jesus at Syciiar, on his way from Judea to Galilee. 
In this journey, "he must needs go through Samaria. 



* Sinai and Palestine, p. 315. 



TOPOGRAPHY. g 41 

Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called 
Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to 
his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus, 
therefore, being weary with his journey, sat thus on 
the well: and it was about the sixth hour. There 
cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus saith 
unto her, Give me to drink. For his disciples were gone 
away unto the city to buy meat." This incident, to- 
gether with the interesting and important discourse, 
both with the woman and with the disciples, to which it 
gave rise, is one fraught with confirmations of the Gospel 
History. The whole of the beautiful and instructive 
story, as related by John, grew spontaneously out of the 
situation where the Saviour on his journey found him- 
self at the noon-day hour ; and all the roots of the story, 
instead of springing from some mythic or legendary brain, 
intertwine among the very peculiarities of the place 
which still remain for examination and cross-examina- 
tion, if desired. In passing from Jerusalem to central 
Galilee, whither Jesus was going, the traveller still 
"must needs pass through Samaria," and pass, too, "near 
to Sychar," or where Sychar stood, of which traces are 
yet discernible. "Jacob's Well" is still there, partly 
hewn in the rock and partly incased in masonry. That 
well is still "deep," not less than seventy-five feet, 
though much rubbish has fallen in and accumulated at 
the bottom. Fragments, ako, of the temple still remain 
on "this mount" of Gerizim, in which the Samaritans 
said "men ought to worship." The rich grain "fields;' 
to which the Saviour pointed his disciples, still spread in 

41 



642 TOPOGRAPHY. 

prospect from the spot, as when " he sat weary by the 
well." In a word, all the essential features of the scene, 
as described by the Evangelist, remain unto this day. 

Dean Stanley, who visited this spot in 1853, records 
his impression of the whole locality in its bearing on the 
sacred narrative, in the following graphic sentences : 
" Of all the special localities of our Lord's life in Pales- 
tine, this is almost the only one absolutely undisputed. 
By the edge of this well, in the touching language of the 
ancient hymn, 6 Qucerens me, sedisti lassus? Here on the 
great road through which 'He must needs go' when 'He 
left Judea, and departed into Galilee,' He halted, as 
travellers still halt, in the noon or evening of the spring- 
day by the side of the well, amongst the relics of a 
former age. Up that passage through the valley, His 
disciples 6 went away into the city/ which He did not 
enter. Down the same gorge came the woman to draw 
water, according to the unchanged custom of the East, 
which still, in the lively concourse of veiled figures 
round the way-side w r ells, reproduces the image of 
Rebekah, and Rachel, and Zipporah. Above them, as 
they talk, rose 6 this mountain ' of Gerizim, crowned by 
the Temple, of which the vestiges still remain, where 
the fathers of the Samaritan sect 'said men ought to 
worship,' and to which still, after so many centuries, 
their descendants turn as the only sacred spot in the 
universe. And around them, as He and she thus sate 
or stood by the well, spread far and wide the noble plain 
of waving corn. It was winter or early spring — 6 four 
months yet to the harvest and the bright golden ears 



TOPOGRAPHY. 

of those fields had not yet 6 whitened' their unbroken 
expanse of verdure. But as He gazed upon them they 
served to suggest the glorious vision of the distant har- 
vest of the Gentile world, which, with each successive 
turn of the conversation, unfolded itself more and more 
distinctly before Him, as he sate (so we gather from the 
narrative) absorbed in the opening prospect, silent 
amidst His silent and astonished disciples." * 

H. B. Tristram, who, with his company of scientific 
explorers, closely examined this locality and its sur- 
roundings in 1864, says : "We mounted the edge of the 
old vault, and read together John iv., the first unfolding 
of a spiritual religion for the whole world. That chap- 
ter read by Jacob's Well brings home the accuracy of 
the narrator. The very ruins are in keeping with the 
scene." f 

And Dr. J. P. Newman, who was at the place in 1861. 
writing on the spot, says : u Had St. John written the 
incidents of the Saviour's journey from Jerusalem to 
Sychar with a previous knowledge that his narrative 
would be subjected to a searching criticism by the 
enemies of Divine truth, he could not have written with 
greater accuracy. As the facts of topography on which 
the traveller relies for the credibility of the story are 
recorded merely as incidents to the story itself, the cor- 
respondence between the statement and the fact is the 
more wonderful and convincing."! 

The principal scene of the Saviour's ministry was the 

* Sinai and Palestine, pp. 238, 239. t Land of Israel, pp. 147, 148. 
t Dan to Beershcba, p. 318. 



644 TOPOGRAPHY. 

basin of the Sea of Galilee. Having been rejected and 
persecuted by his own people, we read that, " Leaving 
Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is 
upon the sea-coast, in the borders of Zabulon and Neph- 
thalim." The country bordering on this beautiful lake in 
his day was widely different in its condition from what 
it is at present. It was then occupied by a large and 
busy population. The soil was rich, and well cultivated 
everywhere. Owing to the great depression of the whole 
region below the sea level, the climate was warm, and 
the gardens and vineyards yielded all the delicious fruits 
of the tropics. Every quarter gave signs of activity and 
thrift. Two splendid cities, bearing the names of roy- 
alty, adorned the shores — Tiberias toward the southern 
extremity, and Julias at the northern. Besides these 
were Capernaum, Chorazin, Bethsaida, Magdala, and 
many other lesser villages ; some of these stood out on 
the clear banks, and some lay half-hid in the foliage of 
the receding hill-sides. These cities and villages sent 
forth their fishermen by hundreds over the lake, which, 
from remotest antiquity, had abounded with fish. Along 
the waters edge were heard the resounding strokes of the 
busy ship-builders at every convenient point. The sur- 
face of the lake was constantly dotted with the white 
sails of vessels of traffic and pleasure, sailing with the 
gentle breeze, or scudding before the mountain gusts; 
while " the beach sparkled with the houses and palaces, 
the synagogues and the temples of the Jewish or Koman 
inhabitants." In a word, the basin of the Sea of Galilee 
was at that period a focus of life and activity, and was 
often called the " Garden of Northern Palestine." 



TOPOGRAPHY. ^5 

This inland sea with its surroundings " was to the 
Roman Palestine almost what the manufacturin <r dis- 
tricts are to England. Nowhere, except in the capital 
itself, could Jesus have found such a sphere for his 
works and words of mercy ; from no other centre could 
'His fame' have so gone throughout all Syria; nowhere 
else could He have so drawn round Him the vast multi- 
tudes who hung on His lips ' from Galilee, from Decap- 
olis, from Judea, and from beyond Jordan/ and ran 
'through that whole region round about/ 'carrying 
about in beds' through its narrow but crowded plain 
' those that were sick, wherever they heard He was ; 9 
and ' whithersoever he entered,' into any of the numer- 
ous ' villages or cities,' there ' they laid the sick in the 
market places,' . . . 'many coming and going, so that 
He had not time so much as to eat.' 

" In that busy stir of life were the natural elements, 
out of which His future disciples were to be formed. Far 
removed from the capital, mingled with the Gentile 
races of Lebanon and Arabia, the dwellers by the Sea of 
Galilee were free from most of the strong prejudices, 
which, in the south of Palestine, raised a bar to his 
reception. 'The people in the land of Zabuhm and 
Nephthalim, by the way of the sea beyond Jordan, 
Galilee of the Gentiles, had sat in darkness,' but from 
that very cause they saw more clearly 'the great 
light,' when it came: 'to them that sat in the region 
and the shadow of death,' for that very reason 'light 
sprang up' the more readily. He came to 'preach the 
Gospel to the poor,' to 'the weary and heavy-laden"— 



646 TOPOGRAPHY. 

'to seek and to save that which was lost/ Where 
could he find work so readily as in the ceaseless toil and 
turmoil of these teeming villages and busy waters ? The 
heathen or half heathen 6 publicans/ or tax-gatherers, 
were there, sitting by the lake side 6 at the receipt of 
custom/ The 6 women who were sinners ' were there, 
either drawn from the neighboring Gentile cities or cor- 
rupted by the license of Gentile manners. The Roman 
soldiers were there, quartered with their slaves, to be 
near the palaces of the Herodian princes, or to repress 
the turbulence of the Galilean peasantry. And the 
hardy boatmen, filled with the faithful and grateful 
spirit by which that peasantry was always distinguished, 
were there also, to supply the energy and docility which 
He needed for his followers."* Such was Christ's chosen 
field of labor. 

Now in reading the history of the gracious ministry 
of Jesus in this notable field, our feeling, our abiding 
impression is, not that we are pursuing a phantom or 
mythic character, but that we are tracing the steps of a 
living man in active contact with living men, and in 
visible connection with the unchanging features of 
physical nature — of mountain, plain, river, lake and 
desert. All the steps and doings of Jesus in this pecu- 
liar region, as related by the Evangelists, are found to 
be in perfect harmony with the conditions and char- 
acteristics of the locality. Wherever the Gospel history 
places Him, on the water or on the land, in the city or 



* Sinai and Palestine t p. 368. 



TOPOGRAPHY. 347 

in the desert place, the representations to their minutest 
details are always in entire accordance with what is 
known to have been the natural state of things there. 
And not only that, but many of the deeds performed 
and many of the discourses uttered here could not have 
been performed or uttered in any other place in the land, 
as they had their birth in, or were called forth by, what 
was peculiar to this spot. Of all this the following will 
serve as convincing examples : Jesus from on board the 
ship teaching the multitude assembled on the shore — 
The disciples at the Master's word letting down their 
net and enclosing a multitude of fishes — Jesus, seeing 
Peter and Andrew casting their net into the sea, calling 
them to follow Him and become fishers of men — James 
and John bidden to leave their father and their nets and 
do the same — The stilling of the great tempest in the sea 
— Jesus requesting the disciples to provide a small ship lest 
the gathering people should throng Him — The rushing 
of the maddened swine down a steep place to be drowned 
in the sea — The parable of the mixed fishes drawn to 
land — Jesus departing by ship to a desert place, and the 
people following on foot — Jesus walking on the sea, and 
Peters attempt to do the same — Jesus standing on the 
shore in the gray of morning and calling to the disciples 
yet out upon the waters, " Children, have ye any meat?" 
Now it is obvious that these are incidents in the life of 
Jesus that could have occurred nowhere else in all Pales- 
tine, save where the Gospel History places Him, namely, 
by the Sea of Galilee ; and it is equally obvious that the 
diversified and important instructions delivered in con- 



648 TOPOGRAPHY. 

nection with them could not have been imparted in con- 
nection with the natural conditions or imagery of any 
other locality, as those instructions owe their significance 
and appropriateness to the peculiarities of this Lake and 
its surroundings. Here the events and their lessons are 
in perfect harmony with the natural scene, elsewliere this 
they could not have been. 

Frequent mention is made in the Gospels of the city 
of Capernaum : two miles west of the point where the 
Jordan enters the Sea of Galilee is a place now named 
Tel Hum; here are extensive ruins, which have long 
been suspected to be those of Capernaum. Captain Wil- 
son, Eoyal Engineers, in his recent survey of this region 
made in 1865, after a careful examination of these 
ancient remains, was led to the belief (and Dean Stanley 
pronounces his evidence to be of the highest rank), that 
here indeed is the very site of that city wherein dwelt 
the Redeemer of men. What chiefly enlisted the interest 
of Captain Wilson was the ruin of the " White Syna- 
gogue," of which he gives the following account : " The 
Synagogue, built entirely of white limestone, must once 
have been a conspicuous object, standing out from the 
dark basaltic back-ground; it is now nearly level with the 
surface, and its capitals and columns have been for the 
most part carried away or turned into lime. The original 
building is seventy-four feet nine inches long, by fifty-six 
feet nine inches wide ; it is built north and south, and at 
the southern end has three entrances. In the interior 
we found many of the pedestals of the columns in their 
original positions, and several capitals of the Corinthian 



TOPOGRAPHY. g^g 

order buried in the rubbish ; there were also blocks of 
stone which had evidently rested on the columns and 
supported wooden rafters. If Tel Hum be Capernaum, 
which we believe it to be, this is without a doubt the 
Synagogue built by the Roman centurion (Luke vii. 
4, 5), and one of the most sacred places on earth. It 
was in this building that our Lord gave the well- 
known discourse in John vi., and it was not without a 
certain strange feeling that on turning over a large 
block we found the pot of manna engraved on its face, 
and remembered the words, / am that bread of life. 
Your fathers did eat manna in the loilderness, and are 
dead." * 

Another city in which the Saviour preached the 
Gospel and wrought many of his mighty works was 
Chorazin. "An hour's journey," says the authority last 
quoted, " north of Tel Hum, and on the left bank of the 
valley which falls into the Lake near it, are the ruins 
of Keazeh, a name strikingly similar to Chorazin, and 
which Pocoke identified with that place. Among these 
ruins are those of a J ewish Synagogue." f 

Both Matthew and Mark make mention of Jesus 
arriving in the Land of Gennesaret. This lay on the 
west side of the Lake, and which Josephus describes as 
being thirty furlongs in length, and twenty in breadth, 
and so fruitful that all sorts of trees grew upon it, enjoy- 
ing perpetual spring. Such a plain precisely in dimen- 
sions and soil and climate is the Ghuweir. Of this II. B. 



* Becovery of Jerusalem, pp. 267-269. f lb., pp. 270, 300. 



650 TOPOGRAPHY. 

Tristram says, " Not the slightest question can arise 
as to the identification of Gennesaret with the modern 
El Ghuweir." * 

"At the southern extremity of the plain of Gennesaret 
is a heap of ruins, now called Mejdel, the site of Magdala, 
once the home of that Mary whose history is so touch- 
ingly recorded in the New Testament." f 

Twice the name of Tiberias is mentioned in connec- 
tion with our Lord's voyages over the Sea of Galilee. 
The site of this once magnificent city is marked by the 
modern town of Tabariyeh. The ruins are extensive, 
" and lying about may still be seen some traces of the 
grandeur of the ancient city — here a magnificent block 
of polished granite from upper Egypt cut into a basin 
six feet four inches in diameter ; there a hunting-scene 
carved on the surface of a hard black lintel of basalt. 
To the south the ruins cover some extent of ground ; 
there are the remains of a sea-wall, and some portions 
of a city wall twelve feet thick ; many traces of old 
buildings, broken shafts and columns, half-buried in 
rubbish." J 

The eventful voyage marked by the "great tempest 
in the sea" landed the Saviour on its east side, in the 
country of the Gergesenes, where a demoniac, rushing 
from the tombs behind, met Him ere he had scarce 
advanced from the shore, whose deliverance led to the 
destruction of the herd of swine. The site of their city, 
Gergesa, Dr. Tristram identifies with the ruins of Khersa, 



* Land of Israel, p. 444. f Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 275. X lb., p. 281. 



TOPOGRAPHY. 

on the left bank of Wady Semakh, at the point where 
the hills end and the plain stretches out toward the 
lake. "About a mile south of this, the hills, which 
everywhere else on the eastern side are recessed from a 
half to three-quarters of a mile from the water's edge, 
approach within forty feet of it ; they do not terminate 
abruptly, but there is a steep even slope, which we 
would identify with the ' steep place ' down which the 
herd of swine ran violently into the sea, and so were 
choked." * Such is the account given of this long dis- 
puted point in Captain Wilson's Survey ; and the adven- 
turous McGregor, who has since sailed down this side 
of the Lake in his open canoe, arrived at the same 
conclusion. 

In the course of the Saviour's ministry by the Sea of 
Galilee, we read once and again of his retiring to a 
desert place. Though the basin of the Lake, as has been 
stated, was everywhere a scene of life and activity, yet 
from almost any point along the shore He would not 
have had to travel far to find such a place. On ascend- 
ing the hills or higher ground, everything rapidly 
changed, and He would soon come to a cool, barren, and 
thinly-tenanted region. A short walk would carry Him 
from the throng and din of population to the silence and 
solitude of the desert. It was these* "desert places/ 1 
thus close at hand, on the table-lands, or in the ravines 
of the eastern and western ranges, which seem to be 
classed under the common name of "the mountain/ 1 



* Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 2S6. 



652 TOPOGRAPHY. 

that gave the opportunities of retirement for rest or 
prayer. He sought these solitudes, sometimes alone, 
sometimes with his disciples. "Come ye yourselves 
apart into a desert place, and rest a while; for there 
were many coming and going, and they had no leisure 
so much as to eat." "And when He had sent the multi- 
tudes away, He went up into a mountain apart to pray : 
and when the evening was come, He was there alone." 

Thus the ministry of Christ in the basin of the Sea 
of Galilee — his teaching on the shores and in the syna- 
gogues; his intercourse with fishermen, taxgatherers 
and centurions; the multitude that thronged Him in 
the streets, and the storm that overtook Him upon the 
waters ; his journeys, his voyages and his retirements — 
as related to us in the Gospel History, are not only 
in entire harmony with every physical condition and 
feature of this region, but receive, as far as that is 
now possible, the most satisfactory confirmation from 
sea and land, plain and mountain, ruined cities and 
desert places, as these are found and seen at this day. 

Our Lord, having at length finished his labors of love 
among the people of Galilee, took his final leave of those 
parts, and directed his steps toward Judea, where He 
was soon to be offered up. The course which He took 
was the circuitous one of the Jordan Valley. Having 
crossed the river, He passed down on the east side, 
teaching the people and healing their diseases, till He 
arrived at the common fording-place, where He recrossed 
the stream, and following the road over the plain came 
to Jericho. This city was situated some seven miles 



TOPOGRAPHY. (553 

west of the Jordan, a mile and a half south of Elisha's 
Fountain, and near the opening of the lateral valley of 
the ancient brook Cherith, now the Kelt. Jericho was 
then a place of note, wealth, and grandeur. Herod the 
Great, more than thirty years before, having made it 
one of his princely residences, had not only erected 
several magnificent buildings there, but also constructed 
vast aqueducts, and established a hippodrome and am- 
phitheatre in its vicinity, and planted in and around it 
extensive palm-groves, balsam-gardens, and vineyards. 
Such was Jericho when Jesus arrived there on this 
memorable journey. And here it was that He gave 
sight to the blind beggar, sitting by the way-side and 
crying, " Jesus thou Son of David have mercy on me." 
Here it was that Zacchaeus, the rich publican, ran before 
and climbed into a sycamore-tree that he might catch a 
sight of Him as He advanced in the midst of the moving 
throng. And here, too, He delivered the parable of the 
Ten Pounds, the which when He had spoken, " He went 
before, ascending up to Jerusalem/' — In all this, we 
again find the Gospel narrative fully sustained ; all that 
is said or implied therein is found in perfect harmony 
with what remains to be seen at this day, both of the 
site and surroundings of this ancient city. Little or 
nothing of the city itself remains, it is true ; but it has 
been ascertained that it lay in the Saviour's direct and 
only route from the Ford of Jordan to Jerusalem, so that 
"He must needs pass through it," just as related. It has 
been found that its site was not less than 3400 feet be- 
low that of Jerusalem, so that the evangelist is strictly 



654 TOPOGRAPHY. 

correct in saying that " He went before, ascending up 
to Jerusalem." It is moreover well known that its 
locality was for many ages marked by palms and bal- 
sams and sycamores, the descendants of those planted by 
Herod and Archelaus. The balsam has utterly perished 
from the plain ; and the last seen of the palm was in 
1838; but of the sycamore a remnant still survives — 
" We were gratified," says Tristram, who was there in 
1864, " by the discovery that, though scarce, it is not 
yet quite extinct in the Plain of Jericho, as we found 
two aged trees in the little ravine just to the south of 
these ruins, in illustration of the Gospel narrative." 
And the prophet's fountain, too, still continues to send 
forth its cool and sweet and abundant flow, trickling its 
way in several rills through the glades of tangled shrubs 
and grass to reach the Jordan river. 

Leaving Jericho, our Lord's way led Him through 
the wild and dangerous gorge of the Kelt — the scene 
of his own parable of the Good Samaritan — and after 
advancing through a long ascent of more than a dozen 
miles, He reached the quiet village of Bethany, nestled 
among vines and fig trees in a sunny and secluded 
hollow close by the very summit of the Mount of Olives. 
Of the site of this place there does not appear to have 
ever been a doubt entertained. A village of some 100 
inhabitants is still found on the spot; the name, how- 
ever, has been changed into El Lazariyeh, in commemor- 
ation of Lazarus whom the Lord raised here to life after 
having been laid in his grave. The few particulars given 
in the Gospel respecting this place, its position on the 



TOPOGRAPHY. £55 

Mount and its distance from Jerusalem, have of late 
been verified by scores of travellers both from Europe 
and America. In the village are shown the traditional 
sites of the house of Simon the leper, and of the house 
and tomb of Lazarus. Whatever may be thought of the 
correctness of these traditions, certain it is that they 
have been handed down without a break from a period 
as early as the fourth century. Of the place pointed out 
as the grave of Lazarus, which is an excavation in the 
rock, Dr. Newman says, " Bearing the marks of great 
antiquity, there is no reason to doubt the identity of 
this tomb. And now, after the lapse of so many cen- 
turies, the inspired story of his resurrection, read upon 
the spot, has all the freshness of reality." * 

Having rested for the night at Bethany, in the morn- 
ing our Lord set out for Jerusalem. His way lay over 
the Mount of Olives. The distance was but two short 
miles ; He saw fit, however, on this occasion to press into 
his service the colt of a friendly disciple, and rode the 
greater part of the way. He was now attended by great 
numbers of people gathered from all parts of the land to 
attend the approaching Feast. This was to prove the 
hour of his highest earthly popularity, yet the hour of 
his deepest sorrow thus far in the world. While the 
multitude led him along in triumph, carpeting the road 
with foliage and with their garments, and shouting, 
"Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that 
cometh in the name of the Lord : Hosanna in ihc high- 



* From Dan to Beersheba, pp. llo, 116. 



656 



TOPOGRAPHY. 



est" — suddenly and to their astonishment, as he came to 
the brow of the Mount, and beheld the city, " He wept 
over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least 
in this thy day, the things which belong to thy peace ! 
but now they are hid from thine eyes." This was one 
of the most remarkable and affecting events in all the 
Saviours life on earth; and nowhere does the Gospel nar- 
rative appear in more striking accord with local features 
than it does here. The complete coincidence of the 
History with the direction and turns and prospects of 
the road travelled is thus graphically set forth by one 
who thoroughly studied both on the spot : 

" One night He halted in the village, as of old ; the 
village and the desert were then all alive with the 
crowd of Paschal pilgrims moving to and fro between 
Bethany and Jerusalem. In the morning He set forth 
on His journey. Three pathways lead from Bethany 
to Jerusalem; one a steep footpath over the summit 
of Mount Olivet; another by a long circuit over its 
northern shoulder; the third, the natural continuation 
of the road from Jericho, over the southern shoulder. 
There can be no doubt that this last is the road of the 
Entry of Christ, not only because it was always the 
usual approach to the city for horsemen and for large 
caravans, such as were now advancing together, but 
also because this fully meets the requirements of the 
narrative. 

" Two vast streams of people met on that day. The 
one poured out from the city, and as they came through 
the gardens whose clusters of palm rose on the south- 



TOPOGRAPHY. 

eastern corner of Olivet, they cut down the long 
branches, as was their wont at the Feast of Tabernacles, 
and moved upwards towards Bethany, with loud shouts 
of welcome. From Bethany streamed forth the crowds 
who had assembled there on the previous night, and who 
came testifying to the great event at the sepulchre 
of Lazarus. The road soon loses sight of Bethany. It 
is now a rough, but still broad and well-defined mountain 
track, winding over rock and loose stones; a steep decliv- 
ity below on the left; the sloping shoulder of Olivet 
above it on the right; fig-trees below and above, here and 
there growing out of the rocky soil. Along the road the 
multitudes threw down the branches which they cut as 
they went along, or spread out a rude matting formed of 
the palm branches they had already cut as they came 
out. The larger portion — those, perhaps, who escorted 
him from Bethany — unwrapped their loose cloaks from 
their shoulders, and stretched them along the rough 
path, to form a momentary carpet as He approached. 
The two streams met midway. Half of the vast mass, 
turning round, preceded; the other half followed. Grad- 
ually the long procession swept up and over the ridge 3 
where first begins 'the descent of the Mount of Olives' 
towards Jerusalem. At this point the first view is 
caught of the southeastern corner of the city. The 
Temple and the more northern portions are hid by the 
slope of Olivet on the right; what is seen is only 
Mount Zion, covered with houses to its base, and sur- 
mounted by the Castle of Herod. It was at this precise 
point, <as he drew near, at the descent of the Mount of 
42 



658 TOPOGRAPHY. 

Olives' — (may it not have been from the sight thus 
opening upon them?) — that the shout of triumph burst 
forth from the multitude, 'Hosannah to the Son of 
David ! Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the 
Lord/ There was a pause as the shout rang through 
the long defile; and as the Pharisees who stood by in the 
crowd complained, He pointed to the stones which, 
strewn beneath their feet, would immediately 'cry out' 
if ' these were to hold their peace/ 

"Again the procession advanced. The road descends a 
slight declivity, and the glimpse of the city is again with- 
drawn behind the intervening ridge of Olivet. A few 
moments, and the path mounts; again it climbs a rugged 
ascent, it reaches a ledge of smooth rock, and in an 
instant the whole city bursts into view. The Temple 
Tower rises as from the earth, the Temple courts spread 
out, and the whole magnificent city, with its background 
of gardens and suburbs on the western plateau behind, 
lies before the view. Immediately below was the valley 
of the Kidron, here seen in its greatest depth as it joins 
the Yalley of Hinnom, giving Jerusalem the appearance 
of a city rising out of a deep abyss. It is hardly possible 
to doubt that this rise and turn of the road — this rocky 
ledge — was the exact point where the multitude paused 
again, and 4 He, when he beheld the city, wept over it/ 
Nowhere else on the Mount of Olives is there a view 
like this. And this is almost the only unmarked spot — 
undefiled or unhallowed by mosque or church, chapel or 
tower — left to speak for itself, that here the Lord's 
feet stood, and here His eyes beheld what is still the 



TOPOGRAPHY. 359 

most impressive view which the neighborhood of Jeru- 
salem furnishes — and the tears rushed forth at the sight. 
— This scene, with the one exception of the conversation 
at the Well of Jacob, stands alone in. the Gospel history 
for the vividness and precision of its localization."* 

Descending the shelving road from the brow of Olivet, 
Christ, with the multitude around Him, in a few minutes 
reached the Brook Kidron, crossed it, and then passed up 
into Jerusalem through one of its Eastern gates. The 
whole city was moved in view of the unexpected and 
exultant procession, and on every side was heard the 
inquiry, Who is this ? But onward like a living flood it 
advanced, and soon, as a Son his Father s house, He 
entered the Temple amid the acclamations of his friends 
and the angry murmurs of his enemies. 

When at Jerusalem the Saviour, we read, often left 
the noise and turmoil of the city, and sought rest and 
retirement im the Garden of Getiisemane. He did so 
on the very last evening of his life. " When Jesus had 
spoken these words, He went forth over the Brook 
Kidron, where was a garden, into the which He entered, 
and His disciples." There in the midnight watch, He 
offered prayer "with strong cryings and tears." There 
"He sweat as it were great drops of blood falling down to 
the ground." There "an angel descended to strengthen 
Him" in his mortal agony. And there, too, it was, thai 
the perfidious disciple betrayed Him into the hands of 
His enemies, "for Judas knew the place, as Jesus oft- 



* Stanley's /Sinai and Palestine, pp. 189, 190. 



660 TOPOGRAPHY. 

times resorted thither with His disciples." — According 
to Joseph as, the suburbs of Jerusalem, in those days, 
abounded with orchards, vineyards, fig-enclosures, and 
gardens, which the people were in the habit of frequent- 
ing for quiet or rest or pleasure. Now all the state- 
ments of the Gospel point to the Garden of Gethsemane 
as lying east of Jerusalem, a short distance from the 
city wall, on the other side of Kidron, and at the foot of 
the Mount of Olives. And just here we find a spot, now 
marked by eight aged olive trees, the most aged, prob- 
ably, on the face of the earth, which from the middle of 
the fourth century at least has been uniformly pointed 
out and looked upon as the very site of "the garden" 
in which the Saviour of the world endured his mortal 
agony. And after the most careful study of the Word, 
and examination of the place, this spot is found to fulfil 
all the conditions of the Gospel history. Teschendorf, 
the distinguished Biblical scholar of Germany, tells us 
that he finds the traditional locality "in perfect har- 
mony with all that we learn from the evangelists."* 
The original garden may have enclosed an area less or 
greater than that now enclosed — it may have lain, or 
may have extended a few rods farther north or a few 
rods farther south than the present limits — and it may 
be impossible at this day to indicate (as Franciscan monks 
undertake to do) the three precise spots where the Saviour 
fell upon his face, or that whereon Judas stood when he 
gave the treacherous kiss — yet we may sit among these 



* licise in den Orient, I. 312. 



TOPOGRAPHY. CG1 

"venerable olive trees," and read the narrative of what 
the Saviour endured for our redemption, and feel assured 
that we are near the place where he prayed, "Saying, 
Father, not my will, but thine be done;" and where 
" being in an agony, He sweat as it were great drops of 
blood falling down to the ground." "Kneeling beneath 
an aged olive," says Dr. Newman, " I gave myself up to 
the undisturbed reflections and hallowed memories of 
the place. The story of our Lord's agony had a reality 
I had never before experienced."* 

We have now contemplated the principal scenes in 
the Saviours life — we have been to Bethlehem Judah, 
the place of his nativity— we have visited Nazareth, the 
home of His childhood and youth, been to the fountain 
whence He drank, and to the brow of the hill from 
which He escaped destruction— we have stood on the 
bank of the Jordan with the multitude that had come 
out from every part, and witnessed His baptism and 
His coming up out of the water — we have ascended the 
"exceeding high mountain," from whence the tempter 
showed Him all the kingdoms of the world — we have 
journeyed to Sychar, looked down into Jacob's Well, and 
up to the ruins of the Samaritan's Temple — we have 
surveyed the coasts of the Sea of Galilee, with the ruins 
of Capernaum, Chorazin, Magdala, and Tiberias; its 
Plain of Gennesaret, its "steep place" of Gergesa, its 
mountains and "desert places" — we have followed Him 
down the other side of Jordan, seen Him ford the stream, 



* Dan to Bcershcba, p. 121. 



662 TOPOGRAPHY. 

and crossing the plain, and coming over to Jericho, em- 
bosomed in palms and sycamores and balsams — we have 
traced His steps along the Brook Cherith, and up the 
long ascent to Bethany, where still remain the memory, 
the name, and the tomb of Lazarus — we have joined the 
triumphal procession m its march over the crown of 
Olivet — we have looked down upon Jerusalem from the 
spot on which the Son of God stood in tears over it — we 
have gone with him into the Temple, and with Him 
passed out of the city again and over the Brook Kidron, 
and with Him entered the deep dark retirement of Geth- 
semane; and in all these widely different and widely 
separated localities^ we have witnessed the most perfect 
harmony with the statements and allusions of the Gospel 
History ; not a hill lifts its head, not a ruin thrusts up a 
fragment, not a stream ripples in its channel, at the 
faintest variance with the Sacred Narrative. And more 
than all this, we have seen that there exist a close 
relation and complete accord between the deeds, dis- 
courses, journeys and voyages ascribed to the Saviour, 
and the places where they are said to have taken place ; 
nowhere in His history do we meet with anything like 
incongruity, anything like " a piece of new cloth on an 
old garment." In short, we have in the topography of 
Palestine as full and as satisfactory evidence that the 
Gospel is a true History of a true and living Man, as the 
nature of the case can admit. 

II. We have similar but still more striking confirma- 
tions of the Sacred Narrative in The intimate connection 
and complete correspondence of the Imagery of (he Oospel 



TOPOGRAPHY. ggo 

History with the natural features vroductions and usages 
of the country. 

The comparisons, figures and similes employed by the 
Great Teacher are as indigenous to Palestine as are its 
vines, lilies and fig trees. To be convinced of this we 
need but glance at a few examples ; and we notice, first, 
the references made to the features of the surrounding 
region in the Sermon on the Mount. 

The Mount on which this sermon (Matthew v., vi. 
and vii.) was delivered, according to tradition, lay a little 
west of the Sea of Galilee, and not far from the city of 
Tiberias. It is a square-shaped hill, about sixty feet in 
height, with two tops, now called the "Horns of Hattin," 
from the village of Hattin at its base. The platform at 
the top is evidently suitable for the collection of a multi- 
tude, and corresponds precisely to the level place (Luke 
vi. 17) to which Jesus would "come down," as from one 
of its higher horns, to address the people. The situation, 
says Dean Stanley, so strikingly coincides with the 
intimations of the Gospel narrative as almost to force 
upon us the conviction that this was the spot. Its retired 
and quiet surroundings rendered it a most suitable place 
for the occasion, and no other mountain in the neighbor- 
hood answers so well the description given. 

One of the most striking objects from this Mount, on 
which the Saviour was sat to teach the assembled multi- 
tude, was the ancient city which occupied the crown of 
the high hill to the north, on which Safed now stands. 
Its elevated position rendered it too conspicuous to be 
hidden from the eyes of any, and thus naturally sug- 



664 TOPOGRAPHY. 

gested the illustration — A city that is set on a hill cannot 
be hid. 

The neighborhood of the Sea of Galilee was enlivened 
nearly the year round (as it still is) by flocks of birds of 
various kinds. These, wheeling over the heads of the 
listening multitude, in their graceful and sportive and 
happy flights, would present a striking contrast with the 
toiling and care-worn dwellers of the plain below — 
sowing, reaping, and stowing away. Such a sight, we 
may well suppose, it was that led to the touching appeal, 
Behold the fowls of the air: they sow not, neither do they 
reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father 
feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? 

Summer now coming on, the brilliantly-colored flowers 
of Palestine were everywhere putting forth their beau- 
ties. Variegated tulips, purple and red gladioli, and 
scarlet anemones (to which the common name shusan, 
" lilies," was applied) * abounded on the Plain of Genne- 
saret, and covered the hill-sides around the Master and 
the listening throng ; and to deepen the impression made 
by the appeal to the fowls of the air, they are bidden 
again to fix their eyes and their attention on these — 
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, 
'neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even 
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to- 
day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not 
much more clothe you, ye of little faith? 



* Sec Tristram's Natural History vfthe Bible, pp. 46lM()5. 



TOPOGRAPHY. gg- 

In Palestine, especially in Galilee, heavy rains rapidly 
flowing together among the hills often form torrents 
that rush down unexpectedly with a violence that tears 
up the soil and sweeps away whatever may lie in their 
course. This was what the Saviour doubtless had many 
times witnessed in the parts of Nazareth, as it is still 
what often occurs there, and His eye while on the 
Mount might have fallen upon the jagged traces, which 
some such a torrent had recently ploughed down the 
side of a neighboring hill, which His discerning mind 
seized and converted into a most appropriate close to his 
wonderful discourse — Whosoever liearetli these sayings of 
mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise ma n, 
which built his house upon a rock: and the rains descended, 
and tlie floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon 
tJiat house; and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock. 

Every observant traveller through Palestine has been 
struck with the thought, that the imagery of the 
Saviour's Parables, like the above illustrations, must 
have been derived from the peculiar, yet to the inhabi- 
tants familiar scenes and operations of that country. 
And this no doubt is true. The Lord read His parables 
to the people from what almost daily fell under their 
own observation. They are truths which his discerning 
eye saw inscribed on their fields, their flocks, their vines 
and fig trees. He did not put the lessons into these 
objects; they were there before. He simply gave voice 
to the inarticulate symbols which they by nature bore; 
and thus His parables are, in an important sense, the 
natural productions of the land wherein He dwelt and 
taught. 



666 TOPOGRAPHY. 

The first recorded parable of our Lord is that of the 
" Sower." This was delivered from a boat, to a multi- 
tude of people, assembled on the shore, near Capernaum. 
And now the natural inquiry is, was there anything near 
or in sight of that spot to suggest the imagery of this 
instructive parable? This was the question which Dean 
Stanley pondered, he tells us, as he rode along the track 
by which the Plain of Gennesareth is approached, where 
nothing could be seen but the steep sides of the hill 
alternately of rock and grass. "When I thought," he 
says, " of the parable of the Sower, I answered, that here 
at least was nothing on which the Divine Teacher could 
fasten. It must have been the distant corn-fields of 
Samaria or Esclraelon on which His mind was dwelling. 
The thought had hardly occurred to me, when a slight 
recess in the hill-side, close upon the plain, disclosed 
at once, in detail, and with a conjunction which I 
remember nowhere else in Palestine, every feature of 
the great parable. There was the undulating corn-field 
descending to the water's edge. There was the trodden 
pathway running through the midst of it, with no fence 
or hedge to prevent the seed from falling here and there 
on either side of it, or upon it ; itself hard with the con- 
stant tramp of horse and mule, and human feet. There 
was the good rich soil, which distinguishes the whole of 
that plain and its neighborhood from the bare hills else- 
where descending into the lake, and which, where there 
is no interruption, produces one vast mass of corn. 
There was the rocky ground of the hill-side protruding 
here and there through the corn-fields, as elsewhere 



TOPOGRAPHY. GG7 

through the grassy slopes. There were the large bushes 
of thorn— the 6 Nabk,' that kind of which tradition says 
that the Crown of Thorns was woven — springing up, like 
the fruit trees of the more inland parts, in the very 
midst of the waving wheat."* As the Lord stood on the 
boat, and lifted up his eyes, He might have seen on 
the rising slopes before Him just such a field, and even a 
husbandman in the very act of scattering his seed over 
it ; and the lesson which He clearly beheld in the inter- 
esting scene He at once interpreted to His attentive 
audience, saying — Behold a sower went forth to sow ; and 
token he sowed some seeds fell by the wayside — some upon 
stony places — some among thorns — and other on good 
ground. 

Another parable that He put forth was that of the 
" Tares among the wheat." This is based on a species 
of malice well known and often practised in Palestine, 
and which is familiar enough to this day in some oriental 
countries. A modern writer, speaking of India, says, 
" See that lurking villain watching for the time when his 
neighbor shall plough his field : he carefully marks the 
period when the work has been finished, and goes in the 
night following, and casts in what the natives call pandi- 
nellu, i. e., pig-paddy: this being of rapid growth, springs 
up before the good seed, and scatters itself before the 
other can be reaped, so that the poor owner of the field 
will be for years before he can get rid of the troublesome 
weed." f Hence the statement in the parable, While men 



* Sinai and Palestine, p. 418. t Roberts' Oriental Illustrations, p. 680. 



668 TOPOGRAPHY. 

slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the tcheat, 
and went his way. — The weeds here called " tares " often 
spring up spontaneously to a very detrimental degree, in 
many parts of Palestine; "around Lake Merom, and 
in the great grain-fields of Samaria, may frequently be 
seen women and children employed in picking out from 
the wheat their tall green stalks, which at first sight 
are hardly distinguishable from the wheat." * Accord- 
ingly, from their familiarity with this practice, the ser- 
vants in the parable come to the householder, and ask 
him, Wilt tlwu then that we go and gather them up ? The 
evil seed having been sowed broad-cast, that was a hope- 
less task, and the answer was, Nay ; lest tohile ye gathei* 
up the tares, ye root up also the tcheat with them. So true 
both to nature and to life is this remarkable parable. 

Under the genial climate of Palestine, and in localities 
of favorable soil, many vegetable productions attain to 
a growth that is quite surprising. This is true of the 
vine in the vale of Eshcol, and it is notably true of the 
" mustard plant " (Sinapis nigra) in various parts of the 
country. There, this species of mustard often reaches 
a form and size which the Saviour denominates a " tree," 
which has appeared sometimes incredible to the people 
of the Western World, where it never amounts to any- 
thing more than a lowly bush. But our Lord's repre- 
sentation in this, as in all else, on investigation, has 
been found strictly correct and natural. Irby and 
Mangles found it between Bysan and Adjeloun as high 



* Sinai and Palestine^ p. 419. 



TOPOGRAPHY. g g 9 

as their horse's head. * Professor H. B. Hackett came 
across a little forest of it, in the neighborhood of Mount 
Carmel, where it measured six, seven, and nine feet in 
height, f Dr. Thomson says that he has seen the Wild 
Mustard, on the rich plain of Akkar, as tall as the horse 
and the rider. J And if it attained such a size, growing 
wild, we may naturally suppose that it grew larger still 
under cultivation in "a Held" or "a garden," as supposed 
in our Lord's reference. Moreover, Maldonatus and Ililler 
inform us that birds, being particularly fond of the seed, 
often settle upon it in great numbers. We see, then, 
how aptly, and how forcibly, too, the marvellous growth 
of the Christian Religion, from its small beginning, is 
set forth in this parable : — The kingdom of heaven is like 
to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed 
in Ms field ; wliich indeed is the least of all seeds; hut 
when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and be- 
cometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge 
in the branches thereof. With the growth of the mustard 
seed into a tree and the fondness of birds for its seed, 
our Lord's hearers doubtless were familiar; they had 
often seen these little tenants of the air in their fields 
and gardens gathering and lodging in the brandies; bo 
that there must have been a singular liveliness in the 
picture which the parable presented to their minds of 
the gathering of coming multitudes to his church for 
support, for comfort, and for safety. 

In one of the parables delivered by our Lord on the 



* Travels, Mar. 12. t Smith's Diet, of Bible. X Land and Book, p. 1! 1. 



670 TOPOGRAPHY. 

shore of the Sea of Galilee, He compares the results of 
the Gospel Ministry to those of a Net, which often 
encloses a variety of fishes, some good and some bad, 
which the fishermen carefully separate. The bad, that 
is, those pronounced unclean by the Law, as wanting 
fins and scales, were rejected ; whilst the good, or those 
pronounced clean, were carefully preserved for use. "As 
illustrating this expression," says Dr. Tristram, " we may 
observe that the greater number of the species taken on 
the lake are rejected by the fishermen, and I have sat 
with them on the gunwale while they went through their 
net, and threw out into the sea those that were too small 
for the market, or were considered unclean. This cus- 
tom brings out in great force the full bearing of the 
parable : " * The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, 
that ivas cast into the sea, and gathered of ever?/ kind, 
which ivhen it teas full, they drew to shore, and sat down, 
and gathered the good into vessels, but cast ilte bad away. 
No comparison or illustration more familiar or more 
natural to the dwellers around that Lake could have 
been employed ; and we may add, that this was the only 
spot of inland Palestine, where this image could have 
any meaning or appropriateness. 

Vineyards, from the earliest periods, were common 
in Palestine ; hence the frequency of the figure in the 
Scriptures of both the Old and the New Testament. 
The Great Teacher opens his parable of the "wicked 
husbandmen" in these words: — There taas a certain 



* Natural History of the Bible, p. 290. 



TOPOGRAPHY. 

householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged if 
round about, and digged a winepress in it, and huilt a 
tower, ami let it out to husbandmen, and toent into a far 
country. One of the main characteristics of the scenery 
of southern Palestine are the vineyard enclosures 
surrounded by loose stone walls, with a square gray 
"Tower "in one corner; these maybe seen to-day, as 
of old, on the slopes of Hebron, and of Bethlehem, and 
of Olivet. "And thus," says Dean Stanley, "the past 
history of the nation concurs with our own present ex- 
perience in pointing to what was one of the most obvious 
and familiar images of Palestine at the time when the 
parables of our Saviour were delivered, of which no less 
than five have relation to vineyards." * 

The scene of the parable of the "Good Samaritan " is 
laid on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho ; and for the 
deed of violence and blood which it describes, no more 
suitable scene could have been found in all the Land ; 
and the topographical allusions in this beautiful narrative 4 
offer clear evidence that its author was familiar with the 
country and had Himself travelled the road and marked 
the peculiar features of the scene of which lie has given 
so correct and vivid a picture. The unfortunate trav- 
eller, it is said, " went down " from Jerusalem to Jericho : 
the former city stood on the high central ridge of the 
country, the latter in the deep Jordan valley, more than 
3000 feet below; we see hence how strictly accurate 
the description of the parable is. The road from imme- 



* Sinai and Palestine, p. 413. 



G72 TOPOGRAPHY. 

diately beyond Bethany lay through " a wilderness as 
bare and as solitary as the Desert of Arabia," and for a 
part of its course through a deep and tremendous gorge, 
dismal and desolate to the last degree. Buckingham, 
in his Travels, speaking of this portion of the road, says, 
" The very aspect of the scenery, the bold projecting 
crags of rocks, the dark shadows in which everything 
lay buried below, the towering height of the cliffs above, 
and the forbidding desolation which everywhere reigned 
around, seem to tempt to robbery and murder, and occa- 
sion a dread of it in those who pass that way." And 
Stanley, describing this locality, says, " The caves in 
the overhanging mountains, the sharp turns of the road, 
the projecting spurs of the rocks, everywhere facilitate 
the attack and escape of the plunderers." Here they 
seize upon the traveller, and rifle him of everything 
valuable about him, and then leave him bleeding and 
naked under the fierce heat reflected from the white 
glaring mountains, to die, unless perchance a passer-by 
pity and save him. A certain man went down from 
Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped 
him of his raiment, and tconnded him, and departed, leav- 
ing him half dead. This touching description, while 
thus in perfect keeping with the features of the scene, 
is also in entire harmony with its whole history. Jose- 
ph us testifies that not only was Judea at this time over- 
run with robbers and ruffians, who committed the 
greatest excesses, but that this road in particular was 
deplorably harassed by banditti. St. Jerome also men- 
tions that this particular part of the road between Jeru- 



TOPOGRAPHY. 

salem and Jericho, was called the "Red Way," as much 
blood had there been shed by robbers; and that in hia 
own time, there was at one point in this wilderness a 
Fort with a Roman garrison, for the protection of trav- 
ellers; so that the incident of the poor traveller in the 
parable falling in that very journey among robbers 
seems taken from the life. And this dread localitv 
is the resort of robbers to this day, and nowhere in 
Palestine is a guard more necessary ; he who goes down 
from Jerusalem to Jericho without an escort is as liable 
now as ever to fall among thieves. The parable, indeed, 
has been enacted within our own day, not a Jew, but 
an Englishman, being the victim on this occasion. 

In the parable of the " unfruitful fig tree " we meet a 
feature that to our notions seems peculiar, and therefore, 
so far, improbable — we refer to a Fig tree planted in a 
Vineyard. However at variance this may be with our 
ideas and practice in this Western World, where we 
never plant a mixture of vines and corn and fruit trees, 
but each kind by itself : yet, as Dean Stanley informs 
us from his own observation, nothing is more common 
in Palestine than to see fig trees, thorn trees, and apple 
trees growing in vineyards, and even in corn-fields, 
wherever they can get soil to support them. 

Fig trees are represented as growing on the Mount of 
Olives wild and on the open road-side. It was a tree 
growing thus by the way that our Saviour, on his 
early return to the great city, approached, hoping to 
find fruit thereon; and that, on finding none. He with 
one withering word converted into a visible parable for 

43 



674 TOPOGRAPHY. 

the admonition of His followers. " This Mount, besides 
its abundance of olives, is to this day sprinkled with fig 
trees ; they may still be seen overhanging the ordinary 
road from Jerusalem to Bethany," growing out of the 
scanty soil that covers the rocks or fills the crevices 
among their fractured ledges. Hence, again, we see how 
consonant with nature, even in its incidental allusions, 
is the Gospel narrative : Now in the morning, as He 
returned into the city, He hungered. And v:hen He saw 
a fig tree in the way, He came to it, and found nothing 
thereon, hut leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit 
grow on thee henceforth forever. And presently the fig 
tree withered away. 

We meet in the Saviour's teachings with two allusions 
of a meteorological nature. One of these has reference 
to the Rain : When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, 
straightway ye say, There cometh a shoicer ; and so it is. 
" In the forty-three days," says Tristram, " during which 
rain fell in 1863-64, the wind was invariably west or 
$out\\-icest." The other reference is to the Temperature : 
When ye see the south wind Lloic, ye say, There 'will l>e 
heat ; and it cometh to pass. " The south wind," says the 
authority just quoted, "is always oppressive, at what- 
ever time of the year it blows. We had two days' sirocco 
with the south wind in November, again on January 
14 and 15, March 1 and 2, April 21 and 25, May 15, 16, 
26 and 27. These were the only occasions on which 
there was south wind, and on each occasion the sirocco 
was most oppressive." :i: 



* Natural History of the Bible, p. 33. 



TOPOGRAPHY. 575 

We need not multiply particular instances of this 
nature any further. — We have now presented sufficient 
evidence and illustration of the intimate connection and 
complete correspondence of the Imagery of the Gospel 
History, throughout, with the natural features and pro- 
ductions and usages of Palestine, as found at this day. 

We have seen that the instructions of Jesus were 
delivered in connection with facts of Geography and 
features of Nature, which still lie beneath the broad 
light of day ; and were drawn from sights and sounds 
which may still be seen and heard. Here is nothing 
that savors of myth or legend. 

We have seen that the Divine Masters teachings 
received their form, and that even his thoughts took 
their color from the natural objects and scenery with 
which he was surrounded ; and hence it is that so many 
have testified, that nowhere do his illustrations and 
parables acquire such force and vividness as when read 
upon the spots where they were uttered. We have seen 
that the wonderful lessons of the Great Teacher are bo 
intimately involved in the conditions and characteristics 
of the localities where they were delivered, that an 
actual examination of those localities by the most com- 
petent and trustworthy of men in our own day has 
resulted in the most complete confirmation of the truth 
and accuracy of the Gospel History that the nature of 
the circumstances will admit. 

In one word, the survey we have taken in this chap- 
ter renders it sufficiently evident, that as the engraved 
seal fits into its own impress in the wax. bo fits the 



676 TOPOCRAPHY. 

History which the Evangelists have given of Jesus of 
Nazareth to the form and features, the conditions and 
characteristics of the Land in which He dwelt. 

H. B. Tristram concludes his journal of travels 
throughout Palestine, undertaken in company with a 
corps of scientific men, with special reference to the 
Geology, Physical Geography, Botany and Zoology of 
the country, with the following unqualified and decisive 
testimony — and we could not wish to close the present 
volume with words or sentiments more appropriate : 
" The primary object of our journey was the investiga- 
tion of physical and natural history, not, however, to the 
exclusion of other objects of interest. We passed through 
the land with our Bibles in our hands, — with, I trust, an 
unbiased determination to investigate facts and their 
independent bearing on sacred history. While on mat- 
ters of science the inspired writers speak in the ordinary 
language of their times (the only language which could 
have been understood), I can bear testimony to the 
minute truth of innumerable incidental allusions in 
Holy Writ to the facts of nature, of climate, of geograph- 
ical position — corroborations of Scripture, which, though 
trifling in themselves, reach to minute details that 
prove the writers to have lived when and where they 
are asserted to have lived ; which attest their scrupulous 
accuracy in recording what they saw and observed 
around them ; and which, therefore, must increase our 
confidence in their veracity, where we cannot have the 
like means of testing it. I can find no discrepancies 
between their geographical or physical statements and 



TOPOGRAPHY. ,77 

the evidence of present facts. I can find no standpoint 
here for the keenest advocate against the full inspiration 
of the scriptural record. The Holy Land not only eluci- 
dates but bears witness to the truth of the Holy Book."* 
Even intelligent Unbelievers, after the most thorough 
examination of the ground for themselves, while they 
will not receive Christ with the heart, and refuse to 
yield their minds to the dominion of the spiritual truth 
which He taught, find themselves constrained to admit 
that the Gospel histories are unquestionable records of 
actual events — of the travels, and deeds and sufferings of 
the great and notable Teacher of Galilee. In the Intro- 
duction to Kenan's Life of Christ, we find this very 
extraordinary testimony to the truth of the evangelic 
history — a testimony which none will suspect of being 
biased in favor of its Divine claims: "I have traversed 
in every direction the district where the scenes of the 
Gospel are laid. I have visited Jerusalem, and Hebron, 
and Samaria. Almost no site named in the story of 
Jesus has escaped me. All this narrative which at a 
distance seems to float in the clouds of an unreal world, 
thus assumed a body, a substantial existence, which 
astonished me. The striking coincidence of texts and 
places, the wonderful harmony of the ideal of the Gos- 
pels, with the country which served as its frame, was for 
me a revelation. I had before my eyes a Fifth Qoepd, 
and thenceforth through the stories of Matthew and 
Mark, instead of an abstract Being who one might say 



Land of Israel, p. 6-10. 



678 



TOPOGRAPHY. 



had never existed, I saw in life and movement a human 
form that challenged admiration." 

To this the writer would add his own humble testi- 
mony, that after having spent years in exploring every 
province of the dreary region of scepticism, he has not 
only found nothing to weaken his faith in the Sacred 
Volume, but, on the contrary, much everywhere to 
strengthen it. And he now lays down his pen with no 
more doubt that its truths were given by inspiration of 
God, than he has that the movements of the Plane- 
tary System are governed by the Laws of Gravitation. 
He accounts the teachings of Jesus as the sublimest 
philosophy within the reach of mortals, and the pros- 
pect of the Eternal Life which He has revealed as the 
source of the highest joy and of the most elevating hope 
to which man can attain in the present world. 

" Before thy mystic altar, Heayenly Truth, 
I kneel in manhood as I knelt in youth. 
Thus let me kneel, till this dull form decay, 
And life's last shade be brightened by thy ray : 
Then shall my soul, now lost in clouds below, 
Soar without bound, without consuming glow." 



GLOSSARY. 



Aberration, deviation from a straight line. 

Ad libitum, without limit, without restriction. 

A fortiori, much more, or with stronger reasons. 

Ammonite, a fossil shell fish, allied to the existing pearly nautilus. 

Amphibians, animals that live both in air and water. 

Anatomy, the art of separating the parts of animal bodies. 

Angiospermous, having the seed enclosed in a pod. 

Anthropology, a discourse or treatise on human nature. 

Arborescent, resembling a tree. 

Archaeology, a discourse or treatise on antiquities. 

Asteroids, the smaller planets. 

Autochthones, primitive inhabitants, aborigines. 

Batrachians, animals of the frog kind. 
Botany, the science of vegetables. 

Calamites, plants with jointed stems or trunks. 

Cambrian, one of the lowest and oldest of rock formations. 

Canine, pertaining to dogs. 

Carbon, pure charcoal. 

Carboniferous, producing carbon or coal. 

Cataclysm, a deluge. 

Centauri, part of a southern constellation. 

Cephalopods, the highest class of molluscan fish. 

Cetaceans, animals of the whale kind. 

Chelonians, animals of the turtle kind. 

Chromatic, relating to color. 

Cornea, the transparent membrane of the eye. 

Cranium, the skull. 

079 



v. 



680 



GL OSSAR Y. 



Cretaceans, animals belonging to the Chalk Period. 
Cygni, a group of stars. 

Devonian, the lowest member of the Secondary Rocks. 
Dinotherium, an extinct animal resembling the elephant. 

Eft, a newt, or lizard. 
ELOHIM, God, Jehovah. 

Embryology, the science of animal rudiments in the egg or womb. 
Epidermis, the cuticle or scarf-skin. 
Ethnology, the study of nations. 
Euripterus, a crustacean of the Silurian Period. 

Faculjs, bright spots or ridges. 
Faeces, excrement. 

Foeticide, the crime of killing the young in the womb. 
Fcetus, the unborn babe, an embryo in course of development. 
Foraminifera, very minute animals forming calcareous shells. 

Ganoids, fishes with shining scales, now nearly extinct. 

Glacial Epoch, a period when the greater part of the earth's surface 

was covered with ice. 
Glottis, the narrow opening at the upper end of the wind-pipe. 
Goniatites, fossil fishes resembling the nautilus. 
Gymnosophist, an Oriental philosopher. 

Habitat, natural place of habitation. 

Hermaphrodite, a term denoting both sexes in the same animal. 
Hieroglyphics, mystical characters or symbols, particularly those 

found on Egyptian monuments. 
Hipparion, a fossil animal resembling the horse. 
Homo, the Latin word for man. 
Humerus, the shoulder. 

Hybrid, a mongrel, or a mixture of two species. 
Hydrogen, a gas which constitutes one of the elements of water. 
Hydrostatics, the science which treats of the weight, motion and 
pressure of fluids. 

Iciitiieosauria, gigantic fishes having paddles like the whale's. 
Inter se, one with the other. 
Invertebrate, without a back-bone. 
Jjm facto, in the very act, in reality. 



GL OSSAR Y. 



C81 



Jeu d J esprit, witty conceit, witticism. 

Jurassic, a rock formation, so named from the Jura Mountains. 

Kosmos, the world, the universe. 

Labyrinthodon, a fossil reptile. 

Larvae, insects in the caterpillar state. 

Larynx, the upper part of the windpipe. 

Lias, one of the secondary groups of f ossiliferous strata. 

Luminiferous, producing light. 

Marsupials, animals that bring forth their young in an embryonic 
state, and then carry them in an external pouch till they reach 
maturity. 

Meteorology, the science that treats of the atmosphere and its phe- 
nomena. 

Mineralogy,, the science which treats of the properties of minerals. 
Molluscans, soft-bodied animals, without skeleton or articulated 
covering. 

Morphology, the science which deals with the form or structure 
of animal organs, independent of function. 

Nebulje, clusters of stars not distinguishable from each other. 
Nitrogen, a gas, one of the elements of the atmosphere. 

Oolite, rock formations of the Secondary Period. 
Optics, the science which treats of light and vision. 
Oxygen, a gas, the vital element in the air we breathe. 

Paleontology, the science of fossil remains. 
Penetralia, the most sacred place within a temple. 
Permian, a formation of the Coal Period. 
Philology, the science of languages. 
Physiology, the science of animal and plantal functions. 
Placentals, the highest class of mammals. 
Planetoids, the smaller planets. 
Platinum, a bright and heavy metal. 
Pleiades, " the seven stars." 

Pneumatics, the science which treats of air and gases. 

Principia, first principles. 

Prognathous, forward prominence of the jaws. 



682 



GLOSSARY. 



Recalcitration, rebounding. 

Satellite, a secondary planet, or moon. 

Selachians, cartilaginous fishes, such as the shark, ray, etc. 

Sensorium, the seat of sense, the brain and nerves. 

Shasters, sacred books of the Hindoos. 

Silurian, a vast system of rocks of the Primary Period. 

Simiad^e, the monkey class of animals. 

Synchronous, happening or existing at the same time. 

Teleological, relating to final causes. 

Triassic, the lower formations of the Secondary Rocks. 

Troglodytes, cave-dwellers. 

Vertebra, a joint of the spine. 

Vertebrata, animals having jointed backbones. 

Wady, Arabic name for a dry valley. 
Wealden, a rock formation of the Chalk Period. 

Zoology, the science of animals. 

Zoophytes, bodies supposed to partake of the nature of both an animal 

and a vegetable. 
Zygomatic, pertaining to the cheek-bone. 



INDEX. 



Aberration, spheric and chromatic, 247. 
Abraham, date of his entering Canaan, 397. 
Affinities, chemical, point to God, 72. 
Agassiz, opposed to Darwinism, 257. 

on Darwin's denial of design, 220. 

protest against transmutation, 257. 
Ages, the stone, and bronze, and iron, 431. 

no definite or definable periods, 433. 
Ammonites, description of, 193. 
Animals, some unchanged through all periods, 
208. 

Antecedents and consequents, often unsearch- 
able, 113. 

Antediluvians, their wickedness, 499. 
Ararat, its situation and altitude, 538. 
Archaeology, 429. 
Ark, Noah's, its dimensions, 513. 

animals to be saved in, their number, 514. 

where it rested, 535. 
Argyll, Duke of, on Devonian Fishes, 184. 

on the variable results of fixed laws, 83. 
Ascidians, our remote ancestors, 161. 
Atmosphere, its composition, 96. 
Azine, its relation to disease, 97. 

Baltic Sea, its geological changes, 443. 

Banneker, Richard, a negro mathematician, 3G5. 

Baptism, of John, where administered, 638. 

Battery, of the torpedo. 229. 

Bethany, its situation and memories, 654. 

Bethlehem, place of Christ's nativity, 634. 

Bow, in the cloud, 544. 

Brixham, cave of, 403. 

Buckland, Dr., on the trilobite eye, 207. 

Canaan, populous on Abram's arrival, 399. 
Capernaum, its remains, 648. 
Carpenter, Dr., his rebuke to materialists, note, 
89. 

his view of the Divine agency, 73. 
Caves, their relic contents, 472. 
Chalk formation, 188. 
Chalmers, Dr., on Divine agency, 114. 
China, its early occupation by man, 412. 
Chorazin, its site and present name, 649. 



Chriestlieb, Prof, on the Chronology of the 

Bible, 493. 
Christ, his sublime enunciations, 33. 

in advance of all his contemporaries, 52. 

his teaching requires no emendation, 53. 

his statements iu harmony with all 
science, 55. 
Christianity has nothing to fear, 259. 
Chronology of the Scriptures, 389. 

from Adam to Abraham, 392. 

of the Orientals, 394. 

and Bible history, 395. 

Bible, covers all established facts, 492. 
Climate, affected by forests, 584. 
Cloud, in the West, an indication of raia, G71. 
Coal measures, their wonders, 194. 
Colors, how produced, 242. 
Composition, of bodies, fixed, 70. 
Correlation of forces, 74. 
Conscience, Darwin's account of, 294. 
Cranium, capacity of, 277. 
Creation, the, not a self-acting machine, 64. 
Creator, ignored by Darwin ami others, SIS, 

agency of, distasteful to materialists, 319. 
Cro-Magnon, human relics of, 307. 
Cromer, coast of, its instructive strata, 509. 
Crust, of the earth, sectiou of, 187. 

Dana, Prof., on species, 181. 
Darwin's theory, irreconcilable with Scripture, 
264. 

productive of social evils, 265. 
Dawson, Principal, on evolution, 240, 
Dead Sea, its depression below the ocean, 609. 

depth at different jxiints, 610. 

gravity of waters, 616. 

shores and surroundings, 611. 

situation, 609. 
Deluge of Noah, and natural history, 407. 

animals saved front, 514. 

extent of, 512. 

geological confirmations of, ' ,r -' 

how produced, .V2f. 

moral aspect of, 601 

not universal as to the glo»»\ 515. 

6d3 



684 



INDEX. 



Deluge of Noah, opinions of authorities, 525. 

physical agencies concerned in, 506. 

procuring cause, 499. 

record of, found at Nineveh, 537. 

traces of, obliterated, 508. 

traditions of, world-wide, 502. 
Democritus, his theory, 164. 
Design, denied by Darwin, 218. 
Devonian system, and its fossils, 196. 
Dvvight, President, on answer to prayer, 119. 

Earth, a dependent of the sun, 40. 

related to the planets, 41. 
Egyptian paintings, 340. 

arts, their origin and progress, 407. 

monarchy, its antiquity, 404. 
Engedi, its location and character, 612. 
Esdraelon, plain of, 599. 
Ether, luminiferous, 47. 
Ethnology, definition of, 325. 
Evolution, theory of, 157. 

contrary to the decisions of reason, 217. 

Darwin's phase of it, 160. 

irreconcilable with Scripture, 165. 

inconsistent with plan, 213. 

on the wane, 256. 

worked out by three gods, 250. 

would produce monsters, 214. 
Evolutionists, how account for their errors, 251. 

their conflicting views, 253. 
Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, 549. 
Extinction, animal, in historic time, 490. 
Eye, its mechanism, 238. 

in the art of taking pictures, 243. 

of the ichthyosaurus, 192. 

of the trilobite, 205. 

Fig-tree by the wayside, 673. 
Figure on the ichthyosaurian eye, 192. 
Fishes, how they acquired fins, 224. 
electric, 229. 

sudden appearance of many species of, 183. 
Forces, mutually convertible, 75. 

nil the will-force of God, 76. 
Forests, their influence on soil and climate, 584. 

Galilee, a pleasant district, 599. 

Sea of, 604. 
Gases, their combinations, 69. 
Gonnesaret, where situated, 649. 
GetliHcmane, Garden of, 659. 
God, as revealed by Christ, 53. 

hidings of his power, 87. 

works oil in all, 69. 
Gods, of the ancient heathen, 29. 
Gorilla, bis habits and organization, 270-2 

contrasted with man, 2S6. 
Goshen, Hobrewn in, 549. 

stay of Hebrews in, 558. 



Gospels, subjected to severe tests and criticisms, 
630. 

not mj'ths nor legends, 631. 

agreement with existing localities, 634. 

images and figures of, 662. 
Gould, on humming-birds, 175. 
Gravitation, all-pervading, 45. 
Great Eastern, its dimensions, 513. 

Hair, its color and texture, 355. 

Hebrews, their multiplication, 549. 

Hermon, Mount, its elevation and aspect, 600. 

Hor, Mount, its height, 601. 

Horns of Hattin, 663. 

Hottentots, negotiating for the Gospel, 363. 
Huleh, Lake, its situation and size, 604. 
Humming-birds, number of species of, 175. 
Hungary, origin of its nobility, 346. 
Huxley, on persistent animals, 208. 

on the glottis, 235. 

his doubtful stand, 254. 

Ichthyosaurus, its structure, 192. 
Imagery of the Gospels, 662. 
Indus, submergence of its delta, 511. 
Insects, their transformations, 232. 
Intelligence, evidences of, in nature, 231, 245. 
Irish, an instance of degeneration, 347. 

Jacob's Well, the Saviour sitting by, 641. 
Jenkins, Thomas, a negro teacher, 366. 
Jericho, ancient and modern, 652. 
Jerusalem, view of, from Olivet, 658. 
Jesus, his teaching in harmony with science, 77. 

sublime doctrines of, 33. 

forestalls the discoveries of science, 55. 
Jews, turned black under the influence of cli- 
mate, 350. 
Jordan, Valley of, 603. 

its three sources, 603. 

its lower course, 606. 
Journey down through the earth's crust, 185. 

Kent's Hole, its contents, 465. 
Kerak, heights of, 615. 
Kidron, its gorge, 611. 
Knives, of stone, 435. 
cuts of, 467. 

Lake-dwellings, their character and relics, 445. 
Land of Promise, central to three continents, 0^5. 

geography of, 589. 

isolation of, 618. 

mould of Hebrew character, 619. 

scenic features, 620. 
Languages, early existence of different, 422. 

families ofj 374. 

rapid change of, 424. 

relationH of. how traced, 377. 
Law, the, place of its delivery, 571. , 



INDEX. 



685 



Laws of Nature, true import of, 62. 

denote 1st, order of facts, 66. 

denote 2d, properties of matter, 67. 

denote 3d, action of substances, 68. 

GiKi's control of, inscrutable, 113. 

immutable, in what sense, 83. 

their bearing on answer to prayer, 103. 

their relation to Providence, 79. 

same everywhere, 35. 

variable results of, 84. 
Lebanon, Mount, its elevation arid grandeur, 593. 
Leontes (Litany), cleft of, 591. 
Light, its velocity, 48. 
Lot's Wife, pillar of, 614. 
Lucretius, his fortuitous notions, 249. 
Lyell, his confession of scientific ignorance, 101. 

on contents of caves, 473. 

on frozen mammoths, 483. 

on the growth of peat-beds, 438. 

on migration of savages, 414. 

on the ceaseless change of languages, 425. 

Magdala, City of, 650. 
Magnetism, of the sun, 50. 
Mammary Glands, how evolved, 226. 
Mammoth, carcasses, frozen and preserved, 483. 

the hairy, 481. 

recency of its existence, 4S8. 
Machinery, human, worked by God's powers, 88. 
Man, a distinct creation, 320. 

descent given from the monkey, 263. 

differs from gorilla in aspect and habits, 
270. 

differs from gorilla in bodily structure, 273. 
differs from gorilla in intellect, 283. 
differs from gorilla in language, 288. 
differs from gorilla in moral sense, 294. 
difference altogether practically infinite, 
298. 

origin according to the Bible, 261. 
origin according to Darwin, 263. 
pedigree given by Darwin to, 162. 
points of resemblance in, to the monkey, 
309. 

Mars, the planet, map of, 42. 
Materialists, their sentiments, 61. 
Menes, his kingdom and population, 407. 
Miller, Hugh, on the atheism of evolution, 166. 

on Devonian fishes, 196. 

on higher orders appearing before lower, 
198. 

Mines, ancient, in the wilderness of Sinai, 577. 
Ministry of Christ, its principal scene, 645. 
Miracles, used sparingly, 520. 
Mississippi River, its shifting channel, 432. 

Valley of, discoveries in, 450. 
Mivart, St. George, on fossil fishes, 180. 

on the early appearance of high organ- 
isms, 201. 



Mivart, St. George, finds increasing objections t> 
Darwinism, 250. 
finds no trace of morality in brut- s, 297. 
Monsters, of evolution, 215. 

not to be found in nature, 214. 
Moore, Dr., on religion and disease, 135. 
Miiller, Max, on the roots of language, 289. 

on the incapacity uf brutes for language, 
291. 

Nature, all-related, 37. 

its parts and provinces in sympathy, 52. 
Nazareth, description of, 635. 
Negroes, antiquity of, 340. 

change in foreign countries, 344. 

grow lighter in other climates, 352. 

mental abilities of, 364. 
New Orleans, its relation to the river, 453. 

discoveries made at, 454. 
Nile, Valley of, discoveries made in, 457. 
Nomads, ancient, their rapid movements, 413. 

Olives, Mount of, 655. 
Ordnance survey, their testimony, 580. 
Organisms, without design, 248. 
Ostiaks, the ancestors of Hungarians, 340. 
Owen, Prof., his description of torpedo battery, 
229. 

on the difference in fossil species, 181. 

Palestine, Eastern, description of, 600. 

Western, description of, 592. 

Western, elevations in, 590. 

Western, ruins of, 597. 

Westprn, sterility aud fertility of, 593. 
Parable of the draw net, 670. 

good Samaritan, 671. 

mustard seed, 668. 

sower, 666. 

tares among the wheat, 607. 

unfruitful fig-tree, 673. 

wicked husbandmen, 67o. 
Peat-beds, their growth and relics, 437. 
Pedigree, given to man by Darw in, 102. 
Philosophers, ancient, their views, 28. 

modem, what they know not, 99. 

their humbling Oo nfe s rion B, 100. 
Pitcairn Island, its population, 4U2. 
Plan, everywhere manifest, 210. 
Planetary system, one in origin, 41. 
Population of tho world, early, I"l. 
Prayer, Christ's teaching on, 104, 

for material benefits authorised, 111. 

for the sick, 125. 

for protection and support, 105. 

of tho Pilgrim l ather*, 117. 

of New England against invasion, 11"*. 

of Scotch Covenant"!-*, 110. 

of England against HlS Armada 1 

of England against Involution, 12.. 



686 



INDEX. 



Prayer, physical benefits from, proved, 133. 

the voice of nature, 131. 

Tyndall's view of, 105. 

Tyndall's experiment on, 127. 

Tyndall's experiment on, its absurdity, 129. 

how answered without a miracle, 111. 
Probabilities, calculation of, 236. 
Procession of Christ over Olivet, 656. 
Providence, an essential doctrine of Scripture, 79. 

denied by materialists, 79. 

geological proofs of, 90. 

world without a, 94. 
Pyramid, the great, 411. 

Quadrupeds, extinct, 480. 

Quatrefages, on man's descent from the monkey, 
279. 

Races of man, the five principal, 326. 

development, early, 416. 

dividing lines cannot be drawn, 359. 

differ in form of skull, 334. 

differ in color of skin, 348. 

differ in quality of hair, 355. 

fertile one with another, 361. 

same in faculties, 362. 

same in vital functions, 360. 

similar in arts, habits, etc., 380. 

similarity in languages, 373. 

Scripture account of their origin, 329. 

supposed distinct origins, 328. 
Renan, remarkable testimony of, to the Gospels, 
G77. 

Roots of language, 289. 

Scripture, a book for every region, 622. 

Sea of Galilee, its basin, G44. 

Sedgewick, Prof., his testimony, 212. 

Serbal, Mount, 572. 

Series, from the monkey to man, 301. 

Sermon on the Mount, G63. 

Shell-mounds, 441. 

Siderial system, 44. 

Silurian Bystem, 199. 

Sinai, Mount, 570. 

Wilderness of, 563. 

boundaries and area, 566. 

description of, 566. 

fertile and watered spots, 580. 

mines of, ancient, 577. 



Sinai, Wilderness'of, tablets on rocks of, 576. 

timber in ancient times, 583. 

torrents in, 574. 
Skull, forms of, 334. 

Skulls, the Engis and Neanderthal, 305. 
Speech, organs of, 234. 
Species, origin of, 170. 

bar to transmutation of, 173. 

higher before lower, 202. 

graduating lines not found, 177. 

past as perfect as the present, 185. 

persistent, 208. 

sudden appearance of, 182. 

transmutation of unknown, 171. 
Sphinx, thick lipped, 419. 
Statistics, of the Hebrews, 547. 
Stone knives and implements, 435. 
Struggle for existence, 159. 
Sucking, how the art w as acquired, 226. 
Sychar, description of, 640. 

Tea, its principle, 95. 
Temptation, the, of Christ, 639. 
Tiberias, City of, its ruins, 650. 
Tidal wave, its phenomena, 530. 
Topography of Palestine, 629. 
Torpedo, its battery, 229. 
Traditions, note, 3S5. 
Trilobite, how widely spread, 203. 
Tristram, H. B., his confirmation of Scripture, 
676. 

Tyndall, his views of prayer, 105. 

requires a sign, 109. 
Types, animals, persistent, 208. 

Urn Shomer, Mount, 569. 
Universal terms, of limited meaning, 522. 
Universe, a, governed by philosophers, 98. 
Usdum, Jebel, 613. 

Vines of Escol and Urtas, 598. 
Vineyards of Palestine, 671. 

Wheatly, Phillis, the negro poetess, 36S. 
Wind, South, forerunner of heat, 674. 
World's, the, early population, 403. 

Xiphodons, herds of, 188. 

Zodiac of Dcndara, 410. 



•CIENCE AND THE IlBLE; 



OB, 



GOD'S SIX DAYS' WORK 



A BOOR OF RARE ORIGINALITY AND BEAUTY. 

By the Author of 

" The Present Conflict of Science with the Christian Religion." 



fHE subject of the work is the grandest and the most profoundly interesting 
that can engage the science, or occupy the mind of man— the creation of the 
WORLD, of the UNIVERSE ! 
Here the reader will find it demonstrated that there is no conflict between 
Science and the account of Creation given by Moses in the Bible ; that both are 
true and in perfect harmony ; that the Bible is literal, pure and beautiful. 
Scripture and Science have met together, 
Genesis and Geology have kissed each other. 

The work embraces the whole science of Geology, and as a study of the general 
system of the universe, of the forms and forces and functions of creation, it is a 
volume of unsurpassed interest — a store-house of golden thought, rich in research, 
profound in truths, vivid in descriptions, unfolding in full and flowing eloquence 
the amazing grandeur of the " SIX WORK-DAYS OF GOD," in which he 
created the world and all things therein. 

It traces the history of our planet from its remote and dateless original I 
through its successive and marvellous geological revolutions, the dark and dismal 
period of its last chaotic condition, and, finally, through the consecutive rtagefl 
which, ultimately arranged, furnished and adorned it to be a fit habitation for man. 

The field traversed by the writer is as sublime as it is immense— he leads Qfl to 
contemplate the impervious night of chaos relieved by the majestic hat, Let du re 
be Light — the clear expanse and magnificent water-works of the Bnnament estab- 
lished— the gathering together of the deep and wide sea, the upheaval of continents 
and islands, and their adornment in the charms and fragrance of vegetation— the 
unveiling of the glorious orbs of the sun and moon and starry hosts of heaven — 
the peopling of the oceans with fishes, and of the air witli birds, of countless forms 



and sizes and habits, all disporting in their native elements and revelling in the 
bliss of existence — the introduction of the cattle of the field, the creeping things 
of the dust, and the wild beasts of the forest — and, finally, the creation of immortal 
man in the likeness and image of his Maker. In following our Author through 
these successive stages of the creation work, we are made to feel, beneath the clear 
blaze of his scientific torch, that the Creator has filled our world with thrilling 
realities, with beauties and wonders, delicious fruits and sparkling gems, 



that the imagination of man has ever been able to produce. 

So clearly is the presence of PLAN, of wise DESIGN, and benevolent ADAP- 
TATION exhibited in every object and scene of creation, that the reader is con- 
strained, from step to step, to exclaim, 



To him who will possess himself of the Light and spirit of this book, the whole 
frame and arrangements of the globe will be beautified, all the revolutions of times 
and seasons invested with lively interest, and all the events of life connected into a 
harmonious system. 

The work is written in a popular and readable style. While it delights the 
student and scholar, it is specially adapted to the understanding of the general 
reader. 

It abounds with beautiful full-page illustrations by the best European and 
American artists, which, together with its clear type and softly tinted paper, render 
it altogether a volume of unusual attraction. It contains over 600 pages, including 
engravings, is bound in 



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